Ge Se ee 


Xe 


* 
* 


Tae 


vos 
ahs 


i424 18 


eile 


RAE dh c8 48 


ya ah 
wr 
af 4%! 


. 
area! 


LO £9 2S AAS LS 4F 4 Ge 
rare 


2,059 FP ary 





rori sReEEESEE SEES age ECRUGEERS : iri C ie RF Spe 4  —  Bri_~Ff eo 
eters Mere , a ; SEE a Sos 2 Saas Sp eset wi nde 
* Secces eee ¥ ; SNM note Ay f OK aye Dre SE A PP, % 


MA 


» 
i, 


Ser 


= 


tS 
> 
Er 


44 


Boose so 


ee 
Sse 


05, 


ae 
Pas rs 


ve 


OD 
Se es eS 
et Oe 


>) 


Be 


S 
HS 
Se 


USL PLL AL ee 


AeA AAA AD 


AP APers 


29096 
Dey 
‘ 


ae oe 
A A A (AKA 


OE ALAK, 


OS 


Uy¢ 


ere 
he 


» 


eM 
i 


Ne 


* ee ; ~ : ae hoe 
‘ ; ; ; SAILS POX : f a : : ee 
; , oe. ; S Oets 2! Pig B Bt aoe eae : Fe OS 
: S ; : oy : oA < Bb oBae 

OA PSH 
ew Po 


Lor 


2 


SLES 
4 4 
AAA AA A AA 
Aa Aw 8 


afae 


fata s 


Pe ee ee 
4 


rey 


care 


< at Fl Oh Ok w, Oh 


‘ 


=a 
en 5 i aa 
Sara 


ES . 
- : a amet 















THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
Wal dina CeRvAr rh 





THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
WITCHCRAFT 


BY 


IAN FERGUSON 


AUTHOR OF ‘*MR KELLO” 


GEORGE G. HARRAP &. CO, LID. 
LONDON CAECUTIA SYDNEY 


First published 1924 
dy Grorce G. Harrap & Co. Lp. 
39-41 Parker Street, Kingsway, London, W.C.2 














Printed in Great Britain by The Riverside Press Limited, Edinburgh 





Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


httos://archive.org/details/philosophyofwitcOOferg 


PREFACE 


N the progress of the witch four comprehensive 
stages are noticeable. She was in the beginning 
the counsellor and consoler of man, the genius of 
the domestic arts, the treasury of knowledge, and the 
inspiration of belief. She was the prophet, priest, 
and king of paganism, and her territory was the 
world. In her second stage her children, grown 
up and envious of her, blessed her no longer, and 
there sounded the hour of challenge. 
A wise woman I am, and for that sin 
To divers ill names men would pen me in. 
Science had commenced the abduction of her ancient 
lore, and what had been popular superstition was 
rapidly becoming pure knowledge. Her decline set 
wn. She sank from official recognition to the popular 
adherence of the common people. Her philosophy 
was welcomed as a defiance of social and religious 
tyrannies, and even formed its tenets into a political 
factor of revolution. 


The third stage is the familiar and terrible period 
7 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





of the religious persecutions, when the Middle Ages 
were obsessed by a sense of the Devil abroad. The 
oldest antagonism of man—the conflict between 
the things of earth and of heaven—now found in 
the witch an actual physical victim, and the long 
degradation of the spiritual actually gave to those 
concerned in her oppression a sense of crusade and 
moral victory. 

This study of witchcraft in social history goes 
beyond the boundaries of historical survey. It has 
seemed to me permissible to accept the witch not 
merely as an actual personage, but as a symbol of 
the predominant instinct toward what may be termed 
‘a philosophy of comfort,’ against which ethics and 
pure knowledge have striven and are striving to-day. 
In her philosophy the witch appealed, whether in 
medicine, ritual, or literature, to what is recognized 
as ‘popular’ rather than to the scientific or arduous. 

This line of least resistance as reproduced in 
modern life and thought is consequently, I think, of 
more than casual correlation to our subject, and it is 
upon this assumption that I have built the fourth and 
final phase of witchcraft. 

In conclusion, I need hardly add that this slender 


survey has no pretensions to be regarded as an 
8 


PREFACE 


academic contribution to a profound and inexhaust- 
ible subject. It is simply the expression of certain 
views associated with the historical witch, and any- 
one sufficiently interested to follow in the track of 
abler and more scholarly minds may find in the Bib- 
liography signposts to a comprehensive examination 
of the various aspects so briefly touched upon. 

My dependence upon both authors and publishers 
for the valuable use of their publications is so wide 
that I trust my expression of indebtedness may be 
served by this general acknowledgment. 


IAN FERGUSON 
March 1924 






4 - Mad ’ 
ait he ek, Views 
ae 


lama 






tM ks 


; A Ae Se, oe 
a8 a a, heey a 
‘ »* ab ony iA% 4 


¢ BA eet he 
Seale Se 


r 






q fi 7 
Ped a ah a wat 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I. Tue Oricins oF THE WITCH 

IJ. Earty CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 
III. Macic anp MEDICINE 
IV. FoLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 
V. Tue TrRiumPH oF THEOLOGY 


VI. THe SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL Dis- 
CIPLINE 


VII. THe DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL 
VALUES 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


13 
34 
52 
81 


107 
140 


169 
Py; 


I] 





THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
WITCHCRAFT 


Eg HLA LERerl 
THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 


I 


HE witch comes out of antiquity as ‘one 
who knows.’ It was to woman that man 
looked in his earliest infancy; it was on 


her that he depended to keep his primitive home 
together while he was out on his ceaseless hunt for 
food; it was from her that he acquired the first rude 
domesticities. Accordingly, in this earliest stage of 
Wall, when the roving tribes lived in groups, the 
hagetisee, or hag (to use our familiar, discreditable 
expression), signified the woman of the stockade. 
Within that partially protected place she would be 
left to pursue her domestic duties throughout the 
daytime. She bore children who acknowledged no 
father, and in her fertility possessed without dis- 
pute the supremacy of the creative agent. Without 
fertility death stands at the threshold. Within 
her protected place the woman would remain while 


A 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


the men exhausted their bodies and minds in the 
ageless warfare with nature, and turning her hand 
and her ingenious mind to the production of food 
founded the domestic arts. All the world of know- 
ledge lay before her. For her and her companions 
in the hot summer or the winter storm there was 
abundance of time to argue upon ways and means 
and the greater mysteries that enclosed them and 
lay behind the black and threatening forests. Time 
was upon the side of the primeval woman. Before 
her stretched whole zons of years in which a 
philosophy of life could be slowly and arduously 
erected. She was the court of appeal so far as 
men were concerned. They were glad enough to 
benefit by her wisdom. They were too tired to 
argue. 

In the daytime the women plied their simple 
domestic round, cleared enclosures for growing food, 
and taking their children to the dark wood-streams 
watched the wild animals at play. Out of this life 
a crude knowledge would be gleaned and be the 
heritage of another generation. Necessity compelled 
experiment, and experiment is the threshold of know- 
ledge. Primitive agriculture developed into a rude 
accomplishment, providing at the worst a scanty pro- 
vender when hunting days were bad. ‘This perpetual 
14 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 





conflict with nature would drive woman to strange, 
ingenious resources and delusions. The sickness of 
children would send her in desperation to the herbs 
that animals ate. Out of a thousand poignant 
disasters or whole-hearted fatalities knowledge of 
antidotes and poisons alike would come. 

The daily burden of the primitive woman would not 
cease with the preparation of food or relief of pain or 
on the falling of darkness. In the group system in 
which primitive peoples lived the evening would be 
the hour for gossip. Woman was accordingly the 
first historian, poet, dramatist, and theologian. About 
the lonely, wretched place where they crouched lay 
the silent, mysterious world, so ominous and so alive 
with baflling forces and malevolent powers. What 
was the explanation of the fierce and howling gale, 
the roaring, living current of the river, and the black 
and lowering mountain? It could be nothing but 
spirits or demons of confirmed malignity. Or who 
could explain the warm and generous sun, the plen- 
~tiful fruits which it produced, and the frenzy of 
love in the spring, except by kindly and amicable 
divinities ? 

Such elementary problems were the commonplaces 
among which religion was born. The deep mystery 
of the world produced its inevitable impression, and 


15 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








as man fought the elements for his bare existence the 
interpretation of nature as a force implacable except 
by arbitration became the foundation upon which 


witchcraft was established. 


IT 

The second stage in the witch’s progress is of the 
utmost importance. She emerges out of the dimness 
of the primitive world as the wise woman who soothes 
man with her potions or scares him with her tales. 
But there is as yet nothing about her to explain her 
survival into epochs of mature civilization. She lacks 
the essential attribute of immortality. Archeological 
research has exploded the old belief that civilization 
was born when the peoples who were later to be 
called Greeks and Latins crossed the Balkans and 
the Alps and came into touch with the sea. It is 
now realized that before the Greeks or Latins be- 
came powerful a series of brilliant cultures developed 
in the regions between the South-eastern Mediter- 
ranean and the Persian Gulf. The afhinities of these 
cultures are still obscure, but at least they presented 
certain resemblances. ‘They achieved a high level 
of material splendour. The men of the Bronze Age 
were not savages winning a precarious livelihood with 
inadequate weapons, but gifted and progressive beings 
16 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 


with a real mastery over the arts and a considerable 
knowledge of engineering. Moreover, they were pro- 
foundly conscious of the mystery of life, and their 
whole culture was influenced by their speculations 
upon it. The Bronze Age men resembled the men of 
the nineteenth century in one capacity: they thought 
upon biological lines. They conceived the idea of 
a great Mother-goddess accompanied by a son or 
husband who died, was mourned, and was restored 
to life. There could be no more forcible or direct 
symbolical rendering of the processes of nature, and 
the scheme was widely and enthusiastically accepted. 
Its influence is very visible in Egypt, though there it 
was somewhat overlaid by a cult of the dead and its 
associated rites. But it was established along the 
coast of Asia Minor, and from there, in the shape of 
the Adonis story, passed into the heritage of Greece. 
Above all, the Mother-goddess ruled in Crete. She 
dominated the brilliant, versatile Minoan life, and 
with Minoan trade penetrated to every corner of the 
Eastern Mediterranean world. When the Greek in- 
vaders from the North broke up the Cretan Empire 
and built their kingdoms on its ruins they found 
the predominant religious conceptions too speculative 
and too limited artistically to make any appeal to 
their practical, esthetic minds. Officially, therefore, 

B 17 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


the old religion was dethroned with the old race. 
But both race and religion lived on, and even in the 
days of Athens’ glory the mysterious Demeter of 
Eleusis maintained her position side by side with 
the matter-of-fact goddess of the Acropolis. More- 
over, the old religion, in the days of its decay, gave 
rise throughout the Greek world to a multitude 
of simple nature-cults, congenial to the minds of 





peasants, which underlay and coloured Greek thought 
throughout the era of its supremacy. These cults, 
having lost the stimulus of the high spiritual con- 
ception which created them, threw out the abundance 
of deities so characteristic of the pagan religion of 
nature in its historic phase. There were the good 
spirits of the corn and the grape, the evil spirits of 
storm or hail; there was Pan himself, a strange, 
wild creature, fit emblem of a nature-worship that 
had lost its inner meaning; and, abounding in a land 
not yet cleared for tillage, there were the manifold 
local spirits of the forest and the chase. To these 
may be traced the origins of that Dianic cult which, 
as will be shown in a later chapter, proved the ruin 
of the medieval witch. But, whatever their local 
form, these deities derived in the main from the 
religions of the Bronze Age, with its ruling Mother- 
goddess. Behind each cult lay the original worship 
18 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 


of life itself, of that principle of fertility which was 
the source and cause of all being. It followed 
naturally enough that the ministrations of the cult 
were performed by a priestess rather than by a 
priest; and the supremacy in Europe of the witch 
over the wizard is due to this worship of the god- 
dess of fertility and to the consequent presidency of 
a woman at her shrine in the sacred grove. ‘There 
would be celebrated the seasonal dances at which 
the worshippers assembled periodically to practise a 
recognized sexual rite. There was nothing of magic 
in all this, nothing terrifying or morbid; but there 
was a potent appeal to simple minds untroubled by 
the leaven of ideas which was beginning to work 
in the towns. Moreover—a point which weighed 
heavily with the Greek mind—the cult was politically 
satisfactory in that it ensured the maintenance of 
the race. 

Of this widespread worship, which was destined 
to make religious and political history in the later 
witches’ sabbaths of the days of persecution, the wise 
woman with all her treasury of magic and traditional 
lore became the centre. Her supremacy was absolute. 
Everything associated with her was destined to take 
its part in the celebration of fertility, and the tools 
of her domestic craft became part of ceremonies which 

oo 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


were to cause profound amazement in medieval courts. 
Since she was skilled in home and field, the broom 
and distaff and pitchfork were the sacred symbols of 
the faith, and took their established place in worship. 
The early supremacy of woman is inseparable from the 
universality of the witch. She was prophet, priest, 
and king. In public worship she celebrated the rites ; 
in the life of the tribe she dictated her policy by 
means of secret incantations and spells; in the private 
life of the individual she acted as medical practitioner 
and priest in one. 

A further development was the inevitable tamper- 
ing with spiritualism. Out of her spiritual prestige 
arose the craving for knowledge of the future. Un- 
daunted, she practised her spells, worked her charms, 
and by her profound insight into human nature (with 
possibly quite a dose of psycho-therapy thrown in) 
achieved her dubious triumphs. She cured by sug- 
gestion with the same facility as she killed by dread. 
But in the age of her supremacy she was a political 
and religious force not to be despised. She had the 
childhood of civilization in her hands, and she moulded 
t with a vision and significance altogether beyond 
the intellectual ideals or social importance of her 
liminished successor, the historical witch. 


20 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 





III 

The Greeks dealt with the witch as they dealt 
with everything else they touched. The figure they 
found was weird and grotesque; the figure they left 
was natural and simple; and in the transformation 
they had added the spell of immutability. Never 
again did witchcraft lose an intimacy with elemental 
forces. The Greek genius endures; but time drove 
the witch out of the sunlight. The first impulse 
toward the darkness was given, almost unconsciously, 
by a people who, like the Greeks, have left an 
abiding mark. The Romans, as history first knows 
them, were men of the Early Bronze Age, with 
its appropriate virtues. One fact in particular was 
stamped upon their consciousness. Their strength 
lay in their new command over metals, and this 
command could not be exercised without fire. 

Moreover, fire, that mysterious force of good and 
evil, was clearly divine. It was also domestic. It 
was therefore attached exclusively to women. The 
fire was kept in the tribe’s central stockade, and 
men who were wanted for hunting or fighting could 
not be spared to look after it. That virginity should 
have been imposed on these women is, without 
question, a most impressive tribute to the importance 


21 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








of fire in the Early Bronze Age economy. The 
success of the tribe was felt to depend on two things, 
the right hands of its warriors and the maintenance 
of its fire, and so nearly were these defences placed 
on the same level that it was not felt possible to 
permit the same woman to be concerned with both. 
She might bear children or she might tend the tribal 
flame, but one function or the other was enough to 
command all her energies, Further, since mothers 
were many, while the keepers of the fire needed to 
be but few, the selection of these latter was made 
with the utmost care, and since, when once selected, 
they had to turn their backs on domestic joys they 
were compensated by honours such as were given 
to no other women and to few men. It is a fact 
of no small bearing in the history of the witch that 
the people who came to dominate the civilized world 
paid this exceptional reverence to a group of virgin 
priestesses of the hearth. As the prestige of Rome 
waxed the supremacy of the Vestals began to react 
upon the position of the priestesses of the old nature- 
worship. They too sought to establish some associ- 
ation with the most exalted priesthood of them all. 
It can fairly be advanced that they too sought to 
occupy themselves with fire, and, as a consequence, 
developed their nocturnal rites. Under the influence 
22 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 





of Rome the flight from the sunlight Meee and in 
the Vestal’s hearth may be the sympathetic origin of 
the witch’s cauldron. 

Wherever Roman feeling penetrated the wise 
woman developed into a creature of mystery. But it 
was long before she lost her old kinship with the 
beneficent nature-deities. The final degradation to 
a companionship with evil is part of that intellectual 
revolution which it was the destiny of Rome to en- 
courage. In the hey-day of Greek thought man was 
concerned with his duty to his country. In the hey- 
day of medieval Christianity he was concerned with his 
duty to his soul. This remarkable abandonment of 
the material world began with Plato, grew powerful 
in the first three centuries of our era, and triumphed 
when the Cesars were replaced by the Popes. Its 
progress is marked by the growth of a philosophy of 
demons. The new philosophy was prolific in minor 
gods. The gradations between good and evil were 
perceived to be infinite, and each new gradation ap- 
peared to demand a new supernatural being as its 
author. ‘The minds of men thus began to be haunted 
by visions of immense troops of minor divinities, posi- 
tive or negative reflections of the ultimate God, the 
angels or demons of later theology. Moreover, as the 
times grew more and more portentous, and as wars 


23 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








and pestilence sapped the strength of Europe, demons 
were realized to be more numerous or at least more 
active than angels. The old bucolic nature-deities 
began to change their characters under the influence 
of this conception, born of an atmosphere of gather- 
ing pessimism, of imperfect divinities, and this change 
laid great and ever-growing emphasis on organized 
rites of nature-worship. 

Such was the atmosphere of credulity and gloom 
which Christianity found. It struggled hard and not 
unsuccessfully to preserve its own doctrines from 
contamination, but it could not remain uninfluenced 
by the prevalent mode of thought. On the contrary, 
Christianity was inspired by it in the attitude which 
it adopted toward the faiths it was already resolute 
to extirpate. The mind of the modern Christian is 
practically untrammelled by the pagan gods. For 
him they do not exist at all; they are mere figments 
of the imagination, It was very different with the 
Christian of the early Church. For him the pagan 
gods had a very real existence; only they were not 
gods, but devils. They were so many aspects of 
evil, so many presentations of the Adversary. Hence 
with the progress of Christianity the old gods were 
driven more and more from the sunlight into the 
darkness, and their priestesses were transformed 
24 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 











more and more completely from wise women into 
witches. 

At last the battle was won. The demons were 
driven from their strongholds, and none did them 
reverence any more for their ancient qualities. But 
the victory was too complete. With the lapse of 
time the Church had developed its function. Instead 
of preparing for the imminent Last Judgment it had 
become engaged in an interminable fight against evil. 
That fight was not ended however utterly the appar- 
ent enemy had been routed. Driven from the sacred 
groves, the old gods gave place to the terrible pres- 
ence of the Prince of Darkness, against whom the 
real battle must now be joined; and the women who 
had hitherto been mere servants of devils were now 
believed to be in unholy compact with Satan himself. 

The evolution of the witch was complete. 


IV 

What, then, were the chief characteristics of the 
prehistoric wise woman in the days of her earliest 
challenge? 

The dividing line between the priestess of the 
ancient pre-Christian faith and the lesser figure of 
the medieval witch was created partly by the develop- 
ment of religious thought, but partly also by political 


25 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 











and social upheaval. The formation of townships and 
a more settled habit of life drove the wise woman 
more and more from the seat of government into the 
home from which she had first emerged and into the 
less conspicuous activities of her ancient calling. Her 
place in the temple was challenged by the priest, who 
broke down her monopoly of oracles, prophecies, and 
ritual, and made them his own. She was overcome, 
but maintained her place by her arts of healing and 
secret knowledge. Religion is a wide field, but the 
world is a broader place than the temple. The wise 
woman pursued a narrower and less innocent path. 
When science departed from her she developed the 
more sinister fragments of her lore. No longer 
allowed to concern herself with political ascendancy 
or established religion or the official treatment of 
disease, she followed the line of least resistance as 
local practitioner and adviser of a profoundly credu- 
lous and superstitious peasantry. With the limitations 
of her sphere her functions remained traditional and 
static, partly ritualistic, partly curative, more and more 
reactionary and dependent upon the psychology of 
fear. 

The familiar instances of her craft underwent 
little change until the days of persecution. But they 
touch upon elements not without significance in their 
26 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 





bearing upon the witch on trial, and should therefore 
be mentioned. 

As a general hypothesis it has been observed that 
with the universal acceptance of diabolic influences 
controlling every human contingency the procedure of 
the witch became closely knit with the supernatural. 
Faith, whether it be justified or misguided, has always 
proved the salvation of the charlatan and the despair 
of the scientist. Her dependence, for example, upon 
the supernatural in medicine is illustrative. The 
witch, like her modern imitators, soon appreciated 
the power of auto-suggestion and self-hypnotism to ac- 
complish what her rudimentary craft failed to achieve. 
The means at her disposal were potent enough, and in 
an age dark with spiritual terrors she brought relief 
or worked a miracle by the faith in her counter-spells. 
It is probable that she dulled the patient’s sensibility 
by drugs and hypnotism. A form of anesthesia has 
been known since the dawn of medicine. “These 
properties,” says Dr Park, with reference to sopori- 
fics, “have especially been ascribed to the juices of 
the poppy, the deadly nightshade, henbane, the Indian 
hemp, and the mandragora, which for us now is the 
true mandrake, whose juice has long been known 
as possessing soporific influence. Ulysses and his 
companions succumbed to the influence of Nepenthe ; 

a] 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 











and, nineteen hundred years ago, when crucifixion was 
a common punishment of malefactors, it was custom- 
ary to assuage their last hours upon the cross by a 
draught of vinegar with gall or myrrh, which had 
real or supposititious narcotic properties.” 1 

Belladonna was also among the witch’s prescriptions, 
and the powdered parts of animals, revolting in char- 
acter, but not lacking in the essential compounds of 
the modern patent medicine, were possibly of as much 
benefit as harm. But her greatest triumphs were 
achieved by the union of auto-suggestion and charla- 
tanry. Terror of the witch deepened as her excur- 
sions into the supernatural increased. She stood by 
popular acceptance between two worlds, and her re- 
puted association with both good and evil spirits gave 
her a monopoly in spiritualism that only the Church 
could, and speedily did, challenge. Accordingly, 
when she became the living symbol for more than 
a dying faith, she provided a practical objective for the 
organized warfare of Christendom against Satan, a 
solitary Prince of Evil undreamed of in the old world 
of innumerable demons. 

The practice of auto-suggestion was cultivated in a 
score of ways. In the hands of beneficent witches it 
dispelled an imaginary sense of diabolic possession by 


1 Roswell Park, The Evil Eye Thanatology, 
28 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 





the repetition of words or the wearing of charms or 
the assurance of health. So long as there was faith 
there was not merely hope, but in minor ailments 
recovery. 

The personal power or fascination of the witch is 
recorded throughout antiquity. Both Greeks and 
Romans erected statues of Nemesis to protect men 
from the doom of the evileye. The idea of this power 
of the spirit or imagination to bring moral and physical 
ruin upon innocent people has always been firmly 
implanted in social history, whether in the curse of a 
witch or the Hymn of Hate of a nation, and may be 
noted in the avoidance among certain modern scientific 
religious sects of contact with the atmosphere of 
conflict or hatred or disease. Indeed, there existed 
a remarkable belief, recorded by Heliodorus in his 
Zthiopica, that sickness was transmitted by the evil 
eye, the more practical explanation of infection being 
at that time unsuspected. 

There was also the witch’s good or malign influence 
by the sense of touch, The belief in the potency of 
the human hand is a commonplace of profane and sacred 
literature. Christ said: “Somebody hath touched me ; 
for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.” 

But the use of incantations was perhaps the most 
effective way of achieving a miracle by perfectly 


29 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





legitimate and impressive methods. Incantations 
served the useful purpose either of producing auto- 
suggestion for imaginary ills or covering with the 
haze of magic a practical remedy in the case of actual 
disability. Mr William W. Story’ remarks: 


It is interesting to know that no less a person than 
Marcus Porcius Cato has left us an ancient form of incanta- 
tion, probably Etruscan, by which he asserts that fractures 
or dislocations can be healed. ‘‘ Take,” he says, ‘‘a reed 
of about four or five feet in length, split it in the middle, 
and let two men hold each end, on a level with their 
thighs. Let one then sing these words as they move 
towards each other, ‘AZotas valta darces dardaries asta- 
taries dissunapiter. At the point where they meet and 
touch each other, let the reed be cut in halves with a 
sword held in the left and right hand of each; and if 
this be bound on to the fracture or dislocation it will be 
healed. Every day an incantation must be sung in these 
words, ‘Huat Hanat Huat ista pista sista domiabo 
damnausta,’ or in these, ‘Huat Haut Haut ista sistar sis 
ardannuabor Dunnaustra.” 


Is this an instance of orthopedic surgery or psycho- 
therapy or simply a shot in the dark? More prob- 
ably its author, in dim groping after knowledge, was 
unable to distinguish between superstition and science. 

Another forbidding but not unnatural belief was 
in the mysterious exchange of disease, which could 
apparently be worked by evil influence, and in like 

1 Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye. 
30 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 


a a aranETE TEER 


manner removed by the aid of witchcraft. It will be 
readily understood how fiercely the terrors of an epi- 
demic weighed upon people who watched asit were with 
apathetic submission the blows of infuriated devils. 

To ignorant minds, untempered by science, sick- 
ness meant one thing only, and that was the malicious 
shaft of an enemy by the hand of magic. After the 
introduction of Christianity disease became the work 
of Satan. Witches, therefore, waged a profitable war 
one upon another, and the condition of the patients 
was aggravated by competing magicians. 

The prehistoric witch was also an adept at rais- 
ing the spirits of the dead, which she accomplished 
in quite our modern way with the assistance of a 
familiar or medium, or with considerable success alone. 
But she took a bolder line than our more solemn 
wizards. There is a classical passage where it 1s 
clearly stated that if arguments about the separation 
of soul and body are continued by sceptics a magician 
will evoke from the lower regions the spirits of the 
dead so that they are visible to human eyes and will 
oblige them to speak.’ 

1 Story, Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye. The procedure is indicated 
in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. The ghosts of the dead are con- 
ceived as recognizable, but differing from living things in that they are 


bloodless. Once they are allowed to drink a draught of blood they can 
hold converse with the living. 


31 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


The ancient and not medieval recipe for removing 
a person who was distasteful by the simple formula 
of moulding his image in clay and pricking it with 
pins to the accompaniment of certain words appears 
to be a policy of despair rather than a triumph of 
evil until the psychic significance is grasped. On the 
surface it seems, like so many of the traditions of the 
witch, a silly and futile act. The act was both silly 
and futile, but in an age convinced of the diabolic 
consequences of such ritual the means were sufficient 
for the end. ‘Take two images,” records Wierus, 
“one of wax and the other of the dust of a dead 
man. Put an iron which could cause the death of a 
man into the hand of one of the figures so that it 
may pierce the head of the image which represents 
the person whose death you desire.” 

The explanation of the efficacy of this magic lies 
within that mysterious region which unites body and 
mind. It would be related to the man whose death 
was contemplated that he was under a witch’s spell. 
In an age when the Church had not yet produced its 
own spiritual antitoxins he was oppressed by a sense 
of his utter incapacity to resist unconquerable forces. 
A feeling of despair would deprive the miserable man 
of all interest in life. He would be shunned by his 
friends, fearful of the evil eye, and his wife would 


32 


THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 





lie sleepless by his side at night. At the first tremor 
of sickness he would succumb, and be hailed as 
another witch’s victim. 


Men may die of imagination 
So depe may impression be taken. 

It was against these and other ancient origins of 
witchcraft that Christianity and science were fated to 
strive and not prevail. All the world was pagan to 
the core, and the early followers of Christ could not 
fling off their deepest convictions like worn-out coats. 
Instead they baptized the witch in the plaintive hope 
that she would become whiter than snow. Super- 
stition henceforth fought superstition, and witchcraft 
was worshipped both in cathedral and pagan shrine. 


CHAPTER II 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 


I 

HE wise woman was so much a part of the 

ancient world that to challenge her would 

have been to challenge the very foundations 
of society. Nor is there any reason to suppose that 
her presence in the social fabric was either resented or 
denied. She was much nearer the fairy godmother 
bestowing upon the children of light the abundance 
of her treasure. She was a tower of refuge in a 
perilous world ostensibly bullied by malicious and 
inscrutable forces. By acting under her guidance 
the demons were appeased, and by adopting her 
magic potions pangs and penalties were assuaged. 
If failure rewarded her spells still was she not dis- 
graced, since’against the malevolence of demons even 
the greatest magic is fallible. Her companions upon 
the long road of knowledge were the pioneers of the 
sciences, pledged to eternal warfare with inaccurate 
knowledge, but without the foundations of truth to 
give them any sense of security. 
34 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 





The benefactions of the witch were accordingly 
widely adopted by the elementary schools of thought, 
and formed the undigested and indigestible meal of 
the future. But she laid the road, however erratic 
and reactionary, to accurate knowledge. She halted 
on the threshold as one who is pledged to imagery 
rather than reality. Against the sense of wonder 
would be levelled both the authority of the Church 
and the contempt of science. She who had given 
all would be denied everything, even her miserable 
life. 

Throughout this survey it will be indicated that 
where the Church denounced the witch with hatred 
the struggling schools of medicine treated her with 
a contempt that was sometimes hardly justified by 
the instability of their own researches. Against the 
ancient philosophy of witchcraft the Church struggled 
to maintain the spiritual values, and in her frantic zeal 
to put heaven within the hail of man commenced the 
long subservience of eternal verities. Where other 
sciences advanced theology alone was static. Be- 
tween these two forces of things proved and things 
revealed stood the witch, with her eternal philosophy 
of delusion and hope. 

There are in the early relationship of Christianity 
and witchcraft two important aspects tonote. There 

35 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





is the attempt to convert the followers of the old faith 
(of which the witch was priestess) tothe new. There 
is, secondly, the evidence—in itself of the first im- 
portance in any final explanation of witchcraft—of the 
official recognition of the dying creed out of which 
the medieval witch descended. 

The early Church was so familiar with the pagan 
spirit that it would have been its greatest miracle had 
it driven it from the temple. What was the situation? 
In those days, when Christianity was barely more 
than tolerated and must walk with circumspection 
through the dark forest of an immemorial paganism, 
the witch stood at every turn of the path. She was 
the priestess of ceremonies sufficiently exhilarating 
for the taste of a rude and temperamental civilization ; 
she was the intercessor between the powers of dark- 
ness and humanity; she cured the terrors of the mind 
by charms and relieved the pangs of the body by spells 
and medicaments. There isa picturesque and dramatic 
legend that on the birth of Christianity a voice travel- 
ling along the shores of the Aigean Sea was heard to 
cry: “Great Pan is dead.” This poetic idea is hardly 
justified by history. In the first place, the ancient 
religion of nature did not collapse at a breath. 
Swinburne, inflamed with the allurement of poetic 


extravagance, wrote, 
36 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 





Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean; the World has 
grown grey from thy breath, 
whereas for ten centuries and more the tardy progress 
of the Church was marked by the adoption rather 
than the condemnation of pagan rites, with all their 
accessory superstitions. 

It has been observed that woman held a place of 
divinity in the ancient world. It had become a part of 
religious worship that woman, not man, should guard 
the mysteries or guide the destinies of a people. In 
her stead the Christian Church canonized the Mother 
of Jesus. 

The Middle Ages made for themselves a New Re- 
deemer endowed with all the qualities they needed most, 
and fashioned with every poetic liberty which the reti- 
cence of the four evangelists permitted. There grew up 
practically a Gospel of Mary, with all the details lacking 
in the four Gospels and acts of Mary to supply all that is 
not said about her in Acts. She becomes all that she 


must needs be if the ordinary man is to reconcile himself 
at all to this exacting Christianity.’ 


Reconciliation—it was reconciliation upon which 
the early Church was prepared to sacrifice ALLER EO 
win the heathen it must perforce give its benediction 
to the witch. 

Secondly, the pagan mind was like a twilight in 


1 G, G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion. 
37 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


which all manner of shadows flitted and were lost. 
The witch had charms against perils by night and 
perils by day, against sickness and death and curses 
and demons. How could the Church meet such an 
armoury of antidotes and spiritual emetics? Not by 
the Sermon on the Mount. It adopted the obvious 
course of meeting charm with charm and spell with 
spell. Where the witch was triumphant the Church 
was also exalted, and between these two rival camps 
the humble doctor pursued his more commonplace 
activities. A patient could choose which he would, 
for all three practitioners were sympathetic in theory. 
A single example will illustrate the point. The most 
prevalent disease in primitive life was probably osteo- 
arthritis. ‘The witch by the use of oil and warmth 
dispersed the demons by pagan incantation. The 
priest next door by the use of oil and warmth dis- 
persed the Devil by Christian invocations. Between 
these two the doctor by the use of oil and the 
advocacy of angels and devils alike had even higher 
hopes of a speedy convalescence. As sickness was 
attributed to the presence of evil spirits, the witch 
expelled them by pagan incantations; the priest with 
equal enthusiasm routed them with Christian exorcism. 
Galtona Moroni, in Dizionario Storico Ecclesiastico, 
says, with admirable gravity: 
38 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 





The only efficacious remedies against infestation by 
spirits are those which the Church adopts, which are: 
the venerable sign of the Cross—exorcisms—prayer— 
fasting —charities—the relics of saints—benediction of 
houses—and sprinkling of blessed water. 


Also: 


The Agnus Dei, the rosary, the scapulary, and medals 
which have been blessed, which are also permitted by 
the Church, are a potent preservative against the deceits 
of the devil, illusions, and superstitions. 


Or, as Herrick has written: 


Holy water, come and bring, 
Sacred spittle, bring ye hither ; 
Meale and it now mix together 
And a little oil with either. 


Give the tapers here their light, 
Ring the saint bells to affright 
Far from hence the evil sprite. 

Hypocrisy did not influence these early healers, 
nor was superstition repellent to the priest or monk. 
Rather was it the breath of his life. He set his mir- 
acles of light against the witch’s miracles of darkness, 
and both were equally spontaneous. ‘The Venerable 
Bede narrates that the heathen of Britain were im- 
pressed first and last by a practical demonstration of 
divine efficiency, and an entire philosophy of mysticism 
would not make up for the clumsiest sleight of hand. 
Accordingly Germanus the Bishop, overtaken by a 


39 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


ee 


storm, sprinkled at a propitious moment a little holy 
water and quelled it, and upon landing gave sight to 
a blind girl by touching her eyes with the relics of 
a saint. But it is only fair to record that in another 
miracle, after the great man had laid his hands upon 
a patient with a fractured skull and thus established 
the cure, he instructed the humble practitioner to 
perform the merely formal ceremonies of his calling. 
This deliberate determination of Christianity to 
adopt the ancient formulas of witchcraft is obvious 
enough in extracts from the prescriptions of physi- 
cians, of which Dr Payne, in English Medicine in the 
Anglo-Saxon Times, provides many interesting and illu- 
minating examples from the Leech Book of Bald. The 
following is the prescription for “elf disease”: 


Go on Thursday evening when the sun is set where 
thou knowest that Helenium stands; then sing the Bene- 
dicite and Pater Noster and a litany, and stick thy knife 
into the wort [root]; make it stick fast and go away; 
go again when day and night divide; at the same time 
go first to church and cross thyself, and commend thy- 
self to God. Then go in silence and though anything 
of an awful nature or a man meet thee, say not any word 
ere thou come to the wort which thou didst mark the 
evening before. Then sing the Benedicite and the Pater 
Noster and a litany; delve up the wort, let the knife 
stick in it. Go again as quick as thou canst to church 
and lay it under the altar with the knife. Let it lie till 


40 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 


the sun be up, wash it afterwards, and make into a drink 
with bishopwort and lichen off a crucifix; boil in milk 
thrice, thrice pour holy water upon it and sing the Pater 
Noster, the Credo, and the Gloria in Excelsis, and sing 
upon it a litany, and mark a cross with a sword round it 
on three sides; and after that let the man drink the wort; 
soon will it be well within him. 


The casual insertion of **soon” is admirable in 
discretion, 
More sceptical is this: 


Against bite of snake if a man procures and eats rind 
which cometh out of Paradise, no venom will damage 
him. ‘Then said he that wrote this book that the rind 
was hard to be gotten. 


The writing of words for the cure of ailments ap- 
peared very early in medical and religious superstition, 
and is simply another variety of suggestion borrowed 
from the witch. For those troubled by chills the 
following, if trusted implicitly, worked wonders: 


Against chills at all hours of the day write on a paper 
and bind with a cord on the neck of the patient in the 
evening the following, “‘In the name of our Lord, cruci- 
fied under Pontius Pilate, by the sign of the Cross of 
Christ. Fevers or quotidian chills, or tertian, or quartan, 
depart from the servant of God. Seven hundred and 
fourteen thousands of angels will follow you, Eugenius, 
Stephanus, Protacius, Sambucius, Dionisius, Chesilius, 
and Quiriacus.” Write these names, and let the patient 
carry them upon him. 


41 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








————————— 


To remove a bone sticking in the throat: 


Look at the patient and say ‘‘Come up, bone, whether 
bone or fruit, or whatever else it is; as Jesus Christ 
raised Lazarus from the tomb, and Jonah out of the whale.” 
Another charm in which spiritual and physical work 

together for good is: 

Take hold of the patient’s larynx and say ‘‘ Blasius the 
martyr, servant of God, saith ‘ Go up bone, or go down.’” 4 
The practical treatment of periodical lunacy or 

perhaps neurasthenia was sharp enough medicine, 
but in certain instances probably efficacious : 

In case a man be month sick [lunatic] take skin of 
mere-swine [ porpoise] make it intoa whipe. Swinge him 
therewith ; soon will he be well. Amen.? 

The natural tendency of a widening Christianity 
was that knowledge of all kinds should henceforth be 
confined more and more to Rome. (‘The saints of 
the Romanists have usurped the place of the zodiacal 
constellations in their observance of the parts of 
a man’s body and that for every limb they have 
a saint.”) The proprietary rights of the pseudo- 
science of astrology are amusing enough: 

St Otilia keeps the head instead of Aries; St Blasius 
is appointed to govern the neck instead of Taurus; 


1 JEtius, Tetrabiblon, Book VIII. 
2 J. F. Payne, English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times. 


42 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 


St Lawrence keepes the backe and shoulders instead of 
Gemini, Cancer and Leo; St Erasmus rules the belly 
with the entrayles, in place of Libra and Scorpius; in 
the stead of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarias, and Pisces, 
the holy Church of Rome hath elected St Burgarde, St 
Rochus, St Quirinus, St John, and many others, which 
governe the thighs, feet, shinnes and knees. 


Diseases were allotted to Roman saints with 
the same confidence as they are handed over to 
Harley Street specialists to-day. St Erasmus was 
as competent to deal with cholic as was St Herbert 
to handle hydrophobia. For the itch the discreet 
St Martin should be instantly summoned, and very 
naturally for the jumps the renowned St Vitus. 

For the wider fields into which medical science 
might trespass there were sacred wells and sacred 
relics as there are to-day, and pilgrimages of a hun- 
dred kinds for every conceivable ailment sent to tor- 
ment the sinner by an indignant God or a vindictive 
Devil. 

Whatever might happen afterward it could for 
centuries be written of men wise and simple: 


Old wives and stanes are his counsellors: his night 
spell is his guard, and charms his physicians. He wears 
Paracelsian characters for the toothache, and a little 
hallowed wax is his antidote for all ills. 


1 John Melton, Astrologaster. 


43 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





II 

And yet it would be a gross injustice to infer that 
in the early history of the Church the fatal partner- 
ship with superstition was not unchallenged. As in 
medicine, the impulse toward pure knowledge glowed 
for a time before it was quenched. The Church did 
for a time recognize the universality of magic with- 
out announcing a holy war of heaven against earth. 
Superstition was still superstition and not godly or 
diabolic, according to authority. Medicine still aimed 
at curing disease and not at routing Satan by God’s 
aid and a powder of dried mice. 

Furthermore, the Church was not without its wit- 
nesses for truth. ‘There was the Bishop of Noyon, 
who was no friend to the truce with superstition. 
He wrote in the seventh century: 


Before all things I declare and testify to you that you 
shall observe none of the impious customs of the pagans, 
neither sorcerers, nor diviners, nor soothsayers, nor en- 
chanters, nor must you presume for any cause, or for any 
sickness to consult or enquire of them; for he who com- 
mits this sin loses unavoidably the grace of baptism. In 
like manner pay no attention to auguries and sneezings ; 
and when you are on a journey pay no attention to the 
singing of certain little birds. But whether you are setting 
out on a journey, or beginning any other work, cross 
yourself in the name of Christ, and say the Creed and 


4.4 





EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 


the Lord’s Prayer with faith and devotion, and then the 
enemy can do you no harm. Let no Christian place 
lights at the temples, or the stones, or at fountains, or at 
trees, . . . or at places where three ways meet, or pre- 
sume to make vows. Let none presume to hang amulets 
on the neck of man or beast, even though they be made by 
the clergy and called holy things and contain the words of 
Scripture; for they are fraught, not with the remedy of 
Christ, but with the poison of the Devil. Let no one 
presume to make lustrations, nor to enchant herbs, nor to 
make flocks pass through a hollow tree, or an aperture 
in the earth; for by so doing he seems to consecrate them 
to the Devil. 

Moreover, as often as any sickness occurs, do not seek 
enchanters, nor diviners, nor sorcerers, nor soothsayers, 
to make devilish amulets at fountains or trees or cross- 
roads; but let him who is sick trust only to the mercy of 
God, and receive the sacrament of the body and blood of 
Christ with faith and devotion; and faithfully seek con- 
secrated oil from the Church, wherewith he may anoint 
his body in the name of Christ, and according to the 
apostle, the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the 
Lord shall raise him up. ? 


This extract, written roughly a thousand years 
before the height of the great witch persecutions, 
presents several points that bear upon future chapters. 
Apart altogether from the moderation and sound sense 
of the injunctions, which display an extraordinary 


1 The recognized sacred places of the ancient faith which figure in the 


medieval witch trials, 


2 Maitland, The Dark Ages. 
45 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


intellectual freedom for the times, it is evident 
that the Bishop fully appreciated the superstitious 
practices of the old faith, but is not deluded by the 
medieval conception of the compact of the witch with 
Satan. It is clear also that he was fully acquainted with 
the ceremonial places where the old religion was prac- 
tised, and it is worth recalling that from such innocent 
and commonplace information as this the Inquisition 
established the historical proof and nature of witch- 
craft. What the princes of the later medieval Church 
ignored then as now was the impious suggestion that 
even the holy amulets and rosaries were only super- 
stition under adoption. Finally, his reference to the 
anointing with oil is in accordance with the practical 
teaching of Christ, which at a later period had de- 
generated into the ceremonial ritual of Holy Unction. 

St Benedict (480-543) is also representative of the 
highest tradition of the early Christian missionary. 
Here was an instance of a man practical in the affairs 
of this world and born before the crusade against 
earthly salvation. He founded an infirmary in con- 
junction with the monasteries, and instructed the 
abbot in his duty in the words: 


The care of the sick is to be placed above and before 
every other duty, as if, indeed, Christ were being directly 
served in waiting on them. It must be the peculiar care 


46 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 





of the Abbot that they suffer from no negligence. The 
Infirmarian must be thoroughly reliable, known for his 
piety and diligence and solicitude for his charge. 


Cleanliness was here, as never afterward until our 
present age, next to godliness. ‘Let baths be pro- 
vided,” he wrote, “‘ for the sick as often as they need 
them.” 

The treatment of disease was then a special duty 
of Christians. By the end of the fourth century, as 
Dr James Walsh in his admirable Medieval Medicine 
points out, hospitals were, with their different classes 
of patients, dwellings for physicians and nurses and 
convalescents, with their workshops and _ industrial 
schools, more advanced than those existing fourteen 
hundred years afterward. 

In church-worship the challenge was equally un- 
mistakable. A popular misconception due to the 
deepening clouds of superstition has allotted to the 
Reformers the dubious honour of building churches 
stripped of ornament and emptied of music. The 
Church of Rome with all its astonishing ritual has 
come in course of time to be regarded as established 
upon ceremonial, whereas Dr G. G. Coulton in one 
of his Medieval Studies says: 


Nothing has more hopelessly undermined extreme 
ritualism than the historical researches of the most learned 


+) 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





ritualists, who have discovered that the thirteenth-century 
altar was bare indeed compared with many which seem 
quite moderate nowadays; and that (to quote from one 
of them) “‘Some pious usages (or later ritual) flow from 
very muddy sources.” 


The Christian Church in the period before the 
Reformation had many faults, but they were not ex- 
travagances of ceremonial. The friars, as Dr Coulton 
has emphasized, may have erred in many respects, but 
they did so on the lines of the most extreme Cal- 
vinists. They cultivated the bleak doctrine of pre- 
destination; their lives lacked nothing in austerity 
and the avoidance of worldly cares; but the theory of 
eternal damnation unrelieved by purgatory is an orig- 
inal contribution of the Roman not Calvinistic faith. 

More than that, the pre-Reformation friars held 
resolutely to simplicity of worship as a counter-attack 
upon the superstitious institutions that were entirely 
pagan in origin and intention. The early Catholic 
Church would have suffered the utmost amazement 
and wonder at the ritual and doctrines of our en- 
lightened age. Sentences from contemporary records 
indicate the purity of thirteenth-century ideals. It 
was no contemporary Anglo-Catholic who wrote: 


What fruit do we expect from these things? The 
admiration of fools or the offerings of the simple? Or 


48 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 





since we are mingled among the heathen, perchance 
we have learned their works and even yet serve their 
idols. 


«These beauties and outward elegancies,” wrote 
a Carthusian of the twelfth century, regarding Church 
pictures, images, and candles, “quickly enervate the 
manly purpose and effeminate the masculine mind, 
It better befits a mind intent on its inward health 
that all without should be rude and neglected.” 
*¢Our small churches will preach,” cried St Francis 
“and men will be more edified by these things than 
by words.” 

Such solitary voices in the conflict with the witch 
should not be forgotten. They make the catastrophe 
that was coming more tragic in its futility, but they 
are after all the pioneers who pointed the ultimate 
pathway of progress. They made the Reformation 
a historical fact. They achieved more. In their 
idealism, so soon quenched and obliterated, they were 
of the divine company of witnesses in the cause of a 
high moral conception of spiritual values. 


III 
Finally this question naturally arises: If the early 
Church was faced by a definite witch organization 
whose origin lay in a pagan religion lost in antiquity, 
D sty 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





what evidence can be produced of a direct line of suc- 

cession uniting the medieval witch with the primitive 
and universal faith? In reply it can be held that there 
is a sufficiency of evidence in England alone that the 
claims and professions of the historical witch were in 
all cases identical with pagan practices prohibited by 
monarchical and ecclesiastical law from the seventh 
century onward. 

Miss Murray in an admirable article has summar- 
ized the edicts of the early period denouncing the 
illusions of women who state that they fly by night 
and prohibiting the wearing of skins of animals at 
the calends of January and forbidding the worship 
of wells or trees. In the twelfth century John of 
Salisbury mentions witches’ sabbaths, or assemblies 
of worshippers of the ancient faith. 

From the earliest days, therefore, the presence of 
a faith older than Christianity was recognized and 
opposed. What was this faith: To the early Chris- 
tian it was heathenism. To the medieval Churchman it 
was witchcraft. On the other hand, to the followers 
of the Dianic cult the supreme master of nature was 
the equivalent of God. To say, therefore, that the 
society of witches was a mere figment of the imagina- 
tion or an invention of the Roman Church 1s utterly 


1 Folklore, vol. xxviii, No. 3. 


50 


EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH 








contrary to historical evidence. But to regard such 
an Organization as definitely Antichrist is equally 
erroneous. 

Finally, it must be remembered that the witch sect 
as an organized religious community declined in some 
countries more rapidly than in others. In England it 
was moribund before the days of medieval inquisition, 
whereas in Scotland it exercised very definite activities 
until the eighteenth century. 


51 


OPEART TER TEE 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 


I 
HE contact between witchcraft and medicine 
was less violent than the rivalry with the 
Church because it was inspired by the desire 
for truth rather than by the passion for suppression. 
The doctor, gleaning what he could from the legendary 
wisdom of the ages, differed from the witch not in 
principle so much as in intention. The witch, like the 
priest, cured to dominate: the doctor cured to exist. 
With the witch, like her rival the priest, the treatment 
of disease was only a department of a vast incoherent 
medley of religious and social rites. To the doctor, 
though possibly an approved Christian and prepared to 
recite the names of the Apostles rather than of the 
gods, the main, and in fact the only, objective was 
medical. He kept aloof from divine partnerships. 
But beyond this humble general practitioner there 
were men who combated the false with that thirst after 
pure knowledge which has been in all ages such a 
source of vituperation and violence. In this respect 
52 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





the history of medicine is a picturesque and impressive 
instance not of the triumph but of the persistence of 
superstition in contemporary life. ‘Tradition, being 
established upon the most cherished habits and customs 
of the greatest number of people, offers a natural and 
combative front to innovation. Since knowledge is 
destitute of pity toward everything that is false or 
retrogressive, so is it found on the frontier line of 
civilization. Behind all discovery there is resentment 
and suspicion. As one sacred thing follows another, 
the sense of ruthless brigandage has directed against 
the scientific mind a popular instinct of hostility. It 
is a peculiarity of human psychology that no news is 
better than bad, and pleasant news, however dubious, 
best of all. The El Dorado of the scientist had little 
enough of the philosophy of dreams. In his zeal for 
facts he shattered fancies, and threatening at the 
threshold of history the wide realm of demons finally 
pronounced the cold austerities of natural law in a 
physical world. 

From the commencement medicine was aware of at 
least two powerful enemies. The Church, pronounc- 
ing the sickness of the body as the visitation of the 
Devil, preached more and more the mournful ideals 
of mortification and victory over death by the humilia- 
tion of the flesh. In the hands of God, not of men, 


53 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





lay the cure of all earthly afflictions, and by prayers 
and exorcisms were mortal disabilities driven forth. 
Such an attitude, based as it was upon a profound 
sense of faith, worked its apparent miracles in cases 
of hysterical or neurotic disease, while in fatal and 
organic cases the will of God was made manifest 
and the gates of heaven reached. Conceive how 
arduous was the task of scientific medicine when 
faced by the enmity of the greatest power in Europe, 
backed up by the instinctive antagonism of the 
people. 

But apart from the challenge of witch and priest 
the scientist in medicine was confronted then as now 
by the embarrassment of the honest or dishonest 
protagonist within his own company. ‘There was the 
charlatan then as now who reaped his easy affluence 
by the union of magic and medicine. ‘There was 
also the honest, but no less dubious, attendant upon 
scientific progress—the advocate of what was popular 
rather than of what was proved. 

It is this attitude of the human mind, so sympa- 
thetic to short cuts to happiness, which provided the 
early pioneers of medicine with a problem similar to 
that of the early Christian priests. 

The charlatan is a charlatan only so far as he pre- 
scribes rubbish with the knowledge that it is rubbish. 


54 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





To prescribe rubbish with every belief that it is of 
value is simply to persuade a patient to utilize the re- 
serves of his own subconscious curative properties and 
to carry on the tradition of witch, priest, and popular 
physician. It is too late in the day to challenge the 
unknown hinterland of human consciousness. 





What is vulgarly called charlatanism is a means of real 
success in medicine, assuming that it is sufficiently skilful 
to inspire great confidence and to form a circle of faith. 
In medicine, above all, it is faith which saves. ‘There is 
scarcely a village which does not possess its male or 
female compounder of occult medicine, and these people 
are—almost everywhere and always—incomparably more 
successful than physicians approved by the faculty. ‘The 
remedies which they prescribe are often strange or ridicu- 
lous, but on this account are so much the more effectual, 
for they exact and realise more faith on the part of 
patients and operators. An old merchant of our acquaint- 
ance, a man of eccentric character and exalted religious 
sentiment, after retiring from business set himself to practise 
occult medicine, gratuitously and out of Christian charity, 
in one of the Departments of France. His sole specifics 
were oil, insufflations and prayers. The institution of a 
lawsuit against him for the illegal exercise of medicine 
established in public knowledge that ten thousand cures 
had been attributed to him in the space of about five 
years, and that the number of his believers increased in 
proportions calculated to alarm all the doctors of the 
district. We saw also at Mans a poor nun who was re- 
garded as slightly demented, but she healed nevertheless 


55 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








all diseases in the surrounding country by means of 
an elixir and plaster of her own invention. The elixir 
was taken internally, the plaster was applied outwardly, 
so that nothing escaped this universal panacea. The 
plaster never adhered to the skin save at the place where 
its application was necessary, and it rolled up and fell off 
by itself—such at least was asserted by the good sister 
and declared to.be the case by the sufferers. This 
thaumaturge was also subjected to persecution, for she 
impoverished the practice of all the doctors round about 
her; she was cloistered rigidly, but it was soon found 
necessary to produce her at least once a week, and on 
the day for her consultations we have seen Sister Jane 
Frances surrounded by the country folk, who had arrived 
overnight, awaiting their turn, lying at the convent gate. 
They had slept upon the ground and tarried only to 
receive the elixir and plaster of the devoted sister. The 
remedy being the same in all diseases, it would appear 
needless for her to be acquainted with the cases of her 
patients, but she listened to them invariably with great 
attention and only dispensed her specific after learning 
the nature of the complaint. There was the magical 
secret. ‘The direction of the intention imparted its special 
virtue to the remedy, which was insignificant in itself. 
The elixir was aromatic brandy mixed with the juice of 
bitter herbs; the plaster was a compound analogous to 
theriac as regards colour and smell; it was possibly 
electuary Burgundy pitch, but whatever the substance, 
it worked wonders, and the wrath of the rural folk would 
have been visited on those who questioned the miracles 
of their nun? 

1 Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. 

(London: William Rider and Son, Ltd.) 
56 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





But the conscious charlatan is another matter, be- 
cause he hates and derides accurate observation. The 
following remarks of Rhazes throw some light upon 
the agile medical charlatans of the ninth century : 


There are so many little arts used by mountebanks and 
pretenders to physic that an entire treatise, had I mind to 
write one, would not contain them. Their impudence is 
equal to their guilt in tormenting persons in their last 
hours. Some of them profess to cure the falling sickness 
[epilepsy] by making an issue at the back of the head in 
form of a cross, and pretending to take something out of 
the opening which they held all the time in their hands. 
Others give out that they will draw snakes out of their 
patients’ noses ; this they seem to do by putting an iron 
probe up the nostril until the blood comes. ‘Then they 
draw out an artificial worm, made of liver. Other tricks 
are to remove white specks from the eye, to draw water 
from the ear, worms from the teeth, stones from the 
bladder, or phlegm from various parts of the body, always 
having concealed the substance in their hands which they 
pretend to extract. Another performance is to collect the 
evil humours of the body into one place by rubbing that 
part with winter cherries until they cause an inflammation. 
Then they apply some oil to heal the place. Some assure 
their patients they have swallowed glass. To prove this 
they tickle the throat with a feather to induce vomiting, 
when some particles of glass are ejected which were put 
there by the feather. No wise man ought to trust his 
life in their hands, nor take any of their medicines, which 
have proved fatal to many. 


1 See Chronicles of Pharmacy, vol. i. 


57 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








And yet to those early pioneers of scientific medicine 
the whole subject must have been bewildering in its 
chaos and in its possibilities. As Sir Squire Sprigge 
has remarked in a recent volume: 


Medicine, as we now understand it, has evolved slowly ; 
true philosophers have been aided in their work as well 
as impeded by wizards and astrologers; the lore of 
mysticism and the researches of herbalists have alike 
been drawn upon. Fundamental scientific discoveries 
have enabled us to sift the materials, whatever their 
sources, from time to time, fitting into a homogeneous 
scheme what duly belongs there, and rejecting what is 
seen to be absurd. But followers of the discarded 
doctrines are not always satisfied by this process; they 
register their protests, and disciples spring up who cling 
to the whole of the ancient creed because parts of it have 
been substantiated by later work, and thus elevated from 
intuition to deduction. The fact that once certain doctrines 
stood for scientific medicine is remembered, and permanent 
faith in them, as an entity, is claimed to have a sound 
basis. In this situation comprehensive negatives may be 
from one time to another time necessary, for at the selected 
time they prevent our knowledge from being choked by 
its own undergrowth." 


The whole field was bristling with possibilities 
which might produce the wildest thories. 
At one time, in medicine, any fancied sign of resemblance 


in the drug or in its name to something in the disease or 
in the disease’s name was thought to be nature’s seal of 


1 Physic and Fiction, 
58 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 








its efficacy in that disease, and in country districts nettle- 
tea (Urtica, nettle) is still the popular remedy ofr nettle- 
rash (urticaria). The so-called principle that like cures like 
—similia similibus curantur—which is the foundation of the 
so-called homceopathic system of medicine, was not the 
induction of full and careful experience, not a conclusion 
reached through adequate observation of instances, but a 
specious theory engendered in the mind of its discoverer 
by the captivating suggestion of the words. Its faithful 
application in practice in all cases might issue in results not 
unlike those which followed the practice of the ingenious 
person who, obeying the Scriptural injunction to pour oil 
into his enemy’s wounds, poured oil of vitriol into them.” 


It was the urgency of the “comprehensive nega- 
tives” of Sir Squire Sprigge in the face of the pre- 
vailing habit of magic in the early practice of medicine 
that drew from Galen words as strict and condemna- 
tory as those of the Bishop of Noyon. Referring to 
a writer on herbs he says: 


1 The doctrine of signatures was founded on the absurd hypothesis 
“that every natural substance which possesses any medicinal virtue 
indicates by an obvious and well-marked external character the disease 
for which it isa remedy, or the object for which it should be employed.” 
Mandrake, from its supposed resemblance to the human form, was 
esteemed as a remedy for sterility ; turmeric as a remedy for jaundice 
because of its brilliant yellow colour; euphrasia (eyebright) as an 
application for diseases of the eye, because it has a black spot in its 
corolla resembling the pupil ; and the bloodstone, because of the occa- 
sional small specks of a blood-red colour on its green surface, is even at 
this day used in some parts of Scotland and England to stop a bleeding 
from the nose, (Paris’s Pharmacologia, p. 33.) 

2 Henry Maudsley, M.D., Natural Causes. 


59 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








He was given to old wives’ fables, and certain mar- 
vellous Egyptian quackeries, mixed up with incantations 
used in gathering medicinal herbs ; he employed periapts 
[amulets] and juggleries which were not only useless and 
outside the art of medicine, but perfectly false; and to 
discuss these things would be waste of time.! 


Another early writer has expressed the scientific 
attitude toward magic as follows: 


Such medicines are to be exploded that consist of words, 
characters, spells and charms, which can do no good at all 
but out of a strong conceit as Pomponatius proves; or 


the Devil’s policy who is the first founder and teacher of 
them. 


Galen, that great pioneer of medicine, did not 
attempt to meet superstition half-way, but cut abso- 
lutely adrift. It was inevitable that a school of 
advanced scientific ideals should ultimately fall foul 
of the Church and the State, but during the brilliant 
epoch of its youth it established the first principles of 
medical technique, accurate diagnosis, and academic 
methods of research. No greater evidence of the 
extraordinary power of witchcraft can be given than 
the humiliation of so advanced a science as medicine 
in the early Middle Ages. 

To a layman the modern methods of treatment and 


1 Galen, De Simplicium Medicamentorum Facultatibus, Book VI. 


60 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





the wide professional experience of the early medical 
teachers is startling in comparison with the spiritual and 
intellectual bondage that is the most prominent feature 
of medieval life. Discoveries which were not so long 
ago a source of proper pride to the medical faculty 
have been recognized as readjustments or modifica- 
tions of methods of that golden era, and systems of 
treatment which perished in the Dark Ages have re- 
appeared like sunlight after storm. That so much 
was a commonplace between the sixth and thirteenth 
centuries is not as fully realized as it should be. A 
few instances will emphasize the point. 

Alexander of Tralles, the author of Pathology and 
Therapeutics of Internal Diseases, practised in the sixth 
century the modern treatment of consumption. He 
advised milk and sea-air. For nervous complaints he 
was as careful as a modern Harley Street specialist. 
Pains in the head he diagnosed as due to worry, 
indigestion, or insomnia. He was an enthusiast for 
massage, hot baths, and diet. For sore throat he 
suggests alumand soda. His philosophy of treatment 
sounds in this era of spells, persecutions, and hell-fire 
a note almost fantastic. When all nature and man- 
kind were declared to be the prey of demons, and 
when this brief life was best treated with hatred and 
scorn, he writes quite calmly: 

61 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








The duty of the physician is to cool what is hot, to 
warm what is cold, to dry what is moist, and to moisten 
what is dry. He should look upon the patient as a besieged 
city, and try to rescue him with every means that art and 
science place at his command. The physician should be 
an inventor, and think out new ways and means by which 
the cure of the patient’s affection and the relief of his 
symptoms may be brought about. 


He was conservative in his preference for leaving 
Nature to save herself as against the new movement 
of his day for operations. He had an instinct against 
methods of treatment likely to cause collapse, and 
arrived at his diagnosis by an elaborate examination 
of the symptoms and the organs of the patient. He 
was perhaps the earliest physician to inquire as a 
matter of procedure into the history of the case. 

Rhazes, who lived in the tenth century, was the 
first physician to diagnose smallpox. He is of interest 
in this particular, that he did not, like Galen, shrink 
from the thought of auto-suggestion, at that time 
under the shadow of the witch. He aimed in the 
best modern manner at the union of skill and hope. 


In treating a patient let your first thought be to 
strengthen his natural vitality. If you strengthen that, 
you remove ever so many ills without more ado. If you 
weaken it, however, by the remedies that you use, you 
always work harm. 


62 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





The great school of medicine founded at Salerno 
in the ninth century reached its zenith in the twelfth. 
When De Renzi produced his history of the Saler- 
nitan school of medicine he laid, as Dr Walsh points 
out,! the whole medical profession under a profound 
debt to him. There are several points of interest 
which Dr Walsh emphasizes, The term of attend- 
ance was three years of college work, four years at 
medicine, a year of practice with a doctor, and an 
additional year of study in anatomy should the student 
desire to practise in surgery. If anyone troubles to 
compare this stringent course with the training of the 
eighteenth-century physician he will appreciate the 
obvious cause of the abundant quackery of that age. 

One of the most valuable and curious documents 
associated with the medical school of Salerno is the 
Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a manual of treatment 
in Latin verse, of which Professor Ordronaux has 
published a translation. It was not intended to be 
more than a popular handbook, and enjoyed an enor- 
mous vogue in the early Middle Ages. It contains 
nothing revolutionary, but it is so modern in its sanity 
and in the absence of the exaggerated gloom and 
apprehension of the medieval religious mind that it is 
only by a stretch of imagination that one can picture 


1 Medieval Medicine, 
63 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








The duty of the physician is to cool what is hot, to 
warm what is cold, to dry what is moist, and to moisten 
what is dry. He should look upon the patient as a besieged 
city, and try to rescue him with every means that art and 
science place at his command. The physician should be 
an inventor, and think out new ways and means by which 
the cure of the patient’s affection and the relief of his 
symptoms may be*brought about. 


He was conservative in his preference for leaving 
Nature to save herself as against the new movement 
of his day for operations. He had an instinct against 
methods of treatment likely to cause collapse, and 
arrived at his diagnosis by an elaborate examination 
of the symptoms and the organs of the patient. He 
was perhaps the earliest physician to inquire as a 
matter of procedure into the history of the case. 

Rhazes, who lived in the tenth century, was the 
first physician to diagnose smallpox. He is of interest 
in this particular, that he did not, like Galen, shrink 
from the thought of auto-suggestion, at that time 
under the shadow of the witch. He aimed in the 
best modern manner at the union of skill and hope. 


In treating a patient let your first thought be to 
strengthen his natural vitality. If you strengthen that, 
you remove ever so many ills without more ado. If you 
weaken it, however, by the remedies that you use, you 
always work harm. 


62 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 








The great school of medicine founded at Salerno 
in the ninth century reached its zenith in the twelfth. 
When De Renzi produced his history of the Saler- 
nitan school of medicine he laid, as Dr Walsh points 
out,! the whole medical profession under a profound 
debt to him. ‘There are several points of interest 
which Dr Walsh emphasizes, The term of attend- 
ance was three years of college work, four years at 
medicine, a year of practice with a doctor, and an 
additional year of study in anatomy should the student 
desire to practise in surgery. If anyone troubles to 
compare this stringent course with the training of the 
eighteenth-century physician he will appreciate the 
obvious cause of the abundant quackery of that age. 

One of the most valuable and curious documents 
associated with the medical school of Salerno is the 
Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a manual of treatment 
in Latin verse, of which Professor Ordronaux has 
published a translation. It was not intended to be 
more than a popular handbook, and enjoyed an enor- 
mous vogue in the early Middle Ages. It contains 
nothing revolutionary, but it is so modern in its sanity 
and in the absence of the exaggerated gloom and 
apprehension of the medieval religious mind that it 1s 
only by a stretch of imagination that one can picture 


1 Medieval Medicine, 
63 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








an Inquisitor or Calvinist pondering the admirable in- 
junction which, if followed, might have left the Great 
Plague out of national catastrophes: 


Let air you breathe be sunny, clear, and bright, 
Free from disease or cess-pools’ fetted light. 


To those with catarrh it is advised: 


Fast well and watch. Eat hot your daily fare, 
Work some, and breathe a warm and humid air. 
Of drink be spare; your breath at time suspend. 
These things observing you your cold would end. 
A cold whose ill-effects extend as far 

As on the chest is known as a catarrh; 
Bronchitis, if into the throat it flows ; 

Coryza, if it reach alone the nose. 


II 

The decline in scientific medicine has been attri- 
buted to so many social and political factors that it 
would be fruitless to advance the belief that in an 
age given over to warfare upon this present world 
the doctor was not likely to receive more encourage- 
ment than the magician. And yet in a period when 
the surgeon was forbidden to practise and therefore 
became extinct, when the witch could cure only by 
Satan and was therefore burned, there was little 
enough bounty for the scientific doctor. And it can- 
not be ignored that in 1527 Paracelsus, Professor of 
64 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





Medicine, cast the works of Galen on the fire and 
swore his knowledge was all drawn from witchcraft. 
But upon one point there can be no sustained 
argument. In the days of the witch in travail magic, 
instead of being routed, was more firmly entrenched 
than ever in the social and religious life. The cere- 
monies of the Church were as steeped in superstition 
as the festivals of the Dianic cult; the edicts of 
astrology controlled the affairs of monarchs and 
serving-men; the sleepless search for the philosopher’s 
stone engaged the greatest intellects of the age; 
spiritualism and necromancy lent an academic flavour 
to witchcraft then as now; surgery, divorced by law 
from any practical knowledge of anatomy, was mori- 
bund, and medicine had come down to the apothecary 
in the town and the witch in the woods. 
Romeo says: 


I do remember an apothecary, 

And hereabouts he dwells, which late I noted 
In tatter’d weeds, with overwhelming brows, 
Culling of simples ; meagre were his looks, 
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones: 
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, 

An alligator stuff'd, and other skins 

Of ill-shaped fishes ; and about his shelves 

A beggarly account of empty boxes, 

Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, 
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, 
Were thinly scatter’d to make up a show. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








It is a dismal enough picture, and yet the memory 
of the great days of medicine was not altogether 
obliterated. It lingered at the back of memory, 
Anesthesia disappeared during the Middle Ages, 
and was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. It 
is worthy of note that Tom Middleton in Women 
Beware Women writes: 


I’]l imitate the pities of old surgeons 
To this lost limb, who, ere they show their art, 
Cast one asleep, then cut the diseased part. 


To return to the decay of medicine, Culpeper, in 
a passage which is as quaint now as it was once, 
no doubt, satisfactory, solemnly declares the greatest 
antipathy to be between Mars and Venus: 


One is hot, the other cold; one diurnal, the other 
nocturnal; one dry, the other moist; their houses are 
opposite; one masculine, the other feminine; one public, 
the other private; one is valiant, the other effeminate ; 
one loves the light, the other hates it; one loves the 
field, the other the sheets; then the throat is under 
Venus, the quinsie lies in the throat (it being under 
Taurus, her sign). Mars eradicates all diseases in the 
throat by his herbs (of which wormwood is one), and 
sends them to A‘gypt on an errand, never to return 
more; this by antipathy. The eyes are under the 
luminaries; the right eye of a man, and the left eye 
of a woman, the sun claims dominion over; the left eye 
of a man, and the right eye of a woman, are the privileges 


66 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





of the moon; wormwood, an herb of Mars, cures both ; 
what belongs to the sun by sympathy, because he is exalted 
in his house, but what belongs to the moon by antipathy, 
because he hath his falls in hers.? 


From the title-page of his treatise some indication 
may be gathered of the intellectual quality of the 
medical profession : 


The English Physician Enlarged. With three hundred 
sixty and nine medicines, made of English Herbs that were 
not in any impression until this. Being an Astrologo- 
Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation, 
containing a complete method of Physick; whereby a 
man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself, 
being sick, for three pence charge. By Nich. Culpeper, 
Gent. Student in Physick and Astrology. 1653. 


The method by which Nich. Culpeper, Gent., 
derived his evidently exhaustive knowledge of the 
properties of herbs may be indicated by his notes 
upon “ The Bay-tree. Its Government and Virtues”: 


That it is a Tree of the Sun and under the celestial 
sign Leo and resisteth Witchcraft very potently, as also 
all the evils old Saturn can do to the Body of Man, and 
they are not a few, for it is the speech of one, and I am 
mistaken if it was not Mizaldus, ‘‘ That neither Witch 
nor Devil, Thunder nor Lightning, will hurt a man in the 
place where a Bay-tree is.” 


1 Culpeper, The English Physician, 
7 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





Seventeenth-century medicine flung a wide net for 
secret remedies. Noage of witchcraft among primeval 
man or modern savage ever ventured so far. 


Their next business is, from herbs, minerals, gums, 
oils, shells, salts, juices, sea-weed, excrements, barks of 
trees, serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and 
bones, birds, beasts, and fishes, to form a composition 
for smell and taste the most abominable, nauseous, and 
detestable they can possibly conceive.! 


The idea so evident in all superstitious medicine— 
that strange parts of animals hold magical properties 
—is simply an inheritance from the witch, and is 
traceable to the primitive faith of savages that if | 
they eat the heart of a lion their bravery will be 
established. But at no other time in the whole 
history of medicine did the use of animals in 
pharmacy become so degraded or absurd. Even 
the witch in her decline could hardly hope to 
emulate the grave use of ‘cocks’ combs, cygnets, 
ants’ eggs, earthenware, frog’s spawn, hairs from 
silkworms, jaws of pikes, perspiration, saliva, in- 
ternals of hens, spiders’? webs, woodlice and a host 
of others.” Against this generous range may be 
placed the following fifteen articles, which cover 
the zoology of the British Pharmacopeeia of 1898: 


1 Swift, 4 Voyage to the Houyhnhnms. 
68 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





‘<‘Cantharides, cod-liver oil, cochineal, honey, lard, 
leeches, musk, ox-bile, pepsin, spermaceti, mutton 
suet, sugar of milk, thyroid gland, wax, wood-fat.” ! 

The eighteenth century was hardly less credulous. 
The efficacy of the moss on the human skull? of a 
murderer received the serious attention of the pro- 
fession, while faith in powdered Egyptian mummies 
existed until the dawn of the nineteenth century. 
Bechler, in Parnassus Medicinalis, records: 





Powdered human bone, in red wine, will cure dysen- 
tery. The marrow and oil distilled from bone is good 
for rheumatism. Prepared human skull is a sure cure for 
the falling sickness [epilepsy]. Moss grown on a skull is 
a hemostatic, 


The trade in mummies was largely in the hands of 
the Jews, who, with a very proper professional pride 
and not wishing either to impede science or to lose 
a profitable calling, upon finding mummies increas- 
ingly scarce, established a special factory where, by 
a process similar to the faking of antique furniture, 
contemporaries “ belonged to the ages.” 

Pepys mentions the habit of cutting pigeons in 

1 A.C. Wootton, Chronicles of Pharmacy, vol, ii. 

2 The charges brought against the witch for disinterring bodies or 
being found in the vicinity of executed criminals have this reasonable 


explanation, and the magical trust in a dead man’s hand during burglary 
certainly existed until comparatively recently. 


69 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





half while alive and applying their bodies to the feet. 
Schroder swears by the gall of a black puppy for 
epilepsy. Ambroise Paré congratulates himself upon 
the recipe of a doctor in Turin for the cure of gun- 
shot wounds; this was composed of young whelps 
boiled with earthworms, turpentine, and oil of lilies. 
Snails made a useful cough mixture when soaked in 
sugar; woodlice bruised and soaked in Rhine wine 
made the Vinum Millepedarum given for dropsy and 
jaundice. 

For diabetes the cure called fora stout heart: “A 
dead mouse, dried and powdered, to be taken each 
morning for three consecutive days.” Good Queen 
Anne knighted an oculist who in his magnum opus 
records that it is beneficial to put a louse in a dull 
eye, because it “tickleth and pricketh so that it 
maketh the eye moist and rheumatick and quickeneth 
the spirits.” 


III 
If this comment upon the collapse of scientific 
“medicine explains anything, it is, as perhaps many 
superior persons do not sufficiently realize, the 
confirmed suspicion among unlettered countryfolk 
until our own generation of a profession not always 
so sincere or so efficient as it is to-day. It also 


JO 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





makes the position of the latter-day village witch 
rather more reasonable, since until our own period 
her homely remedies were frequently beneficial 
and rarely actually dangerous. Hers was a little 
knowledge, but being as old as time was averse 
to dramatic innovations. Secondly, in her com- 
pany the rustic could speak at his ease and know 
where he stood. ‘Thirdly, if his instinct prompted 
him, he felt no scruples in seeking the counsel of 
some rival whose advice might better suit his wishes. 

This attitude of open-mindedness toward the claims 
of both magic and medicine was inseparable from the 
horizon of the peasantry, and is by no means extinct 
to-day. It is illustrated in the following reminiscence : 


As I come in, he puts down a thumbed copy of Cul- 
peper’s Herbal, which was his father’s, and which he 
still reads with vague notions of profit, although he does 
not know a tithe of the herbs by sight, and never gathered 
simples under sun or moon. He sometimes tells me 
there’s a deal more in those old books than you’d think 
for. ‘‘ Doctors” (here bubbles up the latent distrust and 
hostility to the regular practitioner, which goes together 
with absolute dependence upon that hard-working gentle- 
man in hour of need: a sentiment running back perhaps 
to times of witchcraft and home medicine of the pro 
mirifico kind, a rebellion against hard and fast rules and 
the stern categories of -osis and -itis), ‘‘ doctors, they 
don’t seem to reckon much on ’em; but it might be 


71 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





better for some on us if we used them herbs more. 
Father, he was wonderful fond of them; he’d go out of 
a night to gather ’em under the Planets. Once” (and 
here comes the inevitable triumphant instance) “he was 
bad with the ’sipelas in the face; and the book said as 
how mash-maller was the thing to cure it; and he hadn’t 
got no mash-maller, so he took and put on the tea-leaves 
out of the pot, two or three times; and that took it 
clean away. And them gipsy-women, he declares, they 
be won’erful clever, sometimes. ‘There was one came to 
the door sellin’ skewers a year or two ago, and she told 
his wife to take dandelion tea; and that took the slug off 
her liver as quick as quick.” ? 


IV 

But the most dramatic feature in the growth and 
decline of medical science in the Middle Ages is the 
rapid rise and fall of surgery, which after a brief 
dawn of brilliant promise almost completely dis- 
appeared, while medicine struggled on through the 
twilight of magic, to emerge out of a morass of 
necromancies in the nineteenth century. Excom- 
municated by the Church, suppressed by the State, 
and ignored by popular opinion, the eclipse of surgery 
was so complete that its scientific possibilities before 
the days of its extinction can be judged only by a 
brief outline of its progress before the fourteenth 


century. 
1 John Halsham, Idlehurst (Smith, Elder), 


72 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 


The surgeon of that and any period must be judged 
by the character of his technique in the light of his 
knowledge. It might well be asked how surgery was 
possible at all in view of obvious problems in tech- 
nique. ‘Two points of surgical routine, for example, 
would appear to rule out the major operation from all 
medieval practice. How was septic poisoning avoided 
and exhaustion through pain prevented? 

The surgeon of the early Middle Ages was ex- 
tremely particular regarding cleanliness of hands 
and mouth, and for a disinfectant used wine and oil 
in preference to dressings. Professor Allbutt has 
written : 


They washed the wound with wine, scrupulously re- 
moving every foreign particle; then they brought the 
edges together, not allowing wine nor anything else to 
remain within—dry adhesive surfaces were their desire. 
Nature, they said, produced the means of union in a 
viscous exudation—or natural balm, as it was afterwards 
called by Paracelsus, Paré, and Wurtz. In older wounds 
they did their best to obtain union by cleansing, desicca- 
tion, and refreshing of the edges. Upon the outer 
surface they laid only lint steeped in wine. Powder 
they regarded as too desiccating, for powder shuts in 
decomposing matters; wine, after washing, purifying, 
and drying the raw surfaces, evaporates.! 


1 The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery down to the 
Sixteenth Century. 


73 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





It is not possible to give statistics of the mortality 


of cases, but when cleanliness was so obviously a part 


of 
fu 


the surgeon’s routine, and a disinfectant of a use- 
lif primitive kind was used, it is open to question 


whether the chances of death were not more certain 


in 


the London Hospital a generation or so ago. Sir 


Frederick Treves, who was nothing if not frank, wrote 


of 


is 


the old receiving-room : 


Treatment was very rough, The surgeon was rough. 
He had inherited that attitude from the days when opera- 
tions were carried through without anesthetics, and when 
he had need to be rough, strong and quick, as well as very 
indifferent to pain. Pain was with him a thing that had 
to be. It was a regrettable feature of disease. It had to 
be submitted to. At the present day pain is a thing that 
has not to be. It has to be relieved and not merely en- 
dured. . . . There was no object in being clean. Indeed, 
cleanliness was out of place. It was considered to be 
finicking and affected. An executioner might as well 
manicure his nails before chopping off a head. ‘The 
surgeon operated in a slaughter-house-suggesting frock- 
coat of black cloth. It was stiff with the blood and filth 
of years. The more sodden it was, the more forcibly 
did it bear evidence to the surgeon’s prowess. I, of 
course, commenced my surgical career in such a coat, of 
which I was quite proud. There was one sponge to a 
ward. With this putrid article and a basin of once-clear 
water all the wounds in the ward were washed in turn 
twice a day. By this ritual any chance that a patient had 
of recovery was eliminated. I remember a whole ward 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





being decimated by hospital gangrene. . . . People often 
say how wonderful it was that surgical patients lived in 
these days. As a matter of fact, they did not live, or at 
least only a few of them.' 


The rules for the medieval surgeon in operative pro- 
cedure were as excellent as they were simple: “To 
bring together separated parts, to separate those that 
have become abnormally united, and to extirpate what 
is superfluous.” 

Regarding the second point—namely, collapse— 
there is no doubt that anesthesia, one of the genuine 
heritages of witchcraft, was used with good results. 
Chauliac, the most distinguished of the French sur- 
geons of the Middle Ages, states that anesthesia was 
produced by inhalation. 


Some surgeons prescribe medicaments, such as opium, 
the juice of the morel, hyoscyamus, mandrake, ivy, hem- 
lock, lettuce, which send the patient to sleep so that the 
incision may not be felt. A new sponge is soaked by 
them in the juice of these and left to dry in the sun; 
when they have need of it they put this sponge into 
warm water, and then hold it under the nostrils of the 
patient until he goes to sleep. Then they perform the 
operation. 


Before leaving this question it is a melancholy fact 

to be noted that with the science of surgery, destined, 
1 The Elephant Man, 

75 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





one might have expected, to relieve the coming genera- 
tions of a burden of suffering and disability, anesthesia 
disappeared beneath the onslaughts of superstition, and 
even the blessed boon of chloroform, discovered last 
century, excited the bitter antagonism of sectionsof the 
Christian Church. The hostility of the times was so 
united as to be overwhelming. During the European 
War facial surgery was widely recognized as a new 
triumph of technique. But it should be remembered 
that six hundred years earlier operations for the res- 
toration of the nose were performed by the Brancas, 
and the union of torn lips and ears effected success- 
fully. To restore the nose flesh was taken from the 
upper arm. The Brancas were fortunate enough to 
live in a period before the Roman Church decided (as 
one might toss up a coin) that surgery was a repre- 
hensible business and must cease. Their successor 
in plastic surgery, Tagliacozzi, was denounced and 
persecuted. The tide of religious superstition was 
indeed running high. As Dr Walsh remarks: “As late 
as 1788 the Paris faculty interdicted face-repairing 
altogether.” 

Nerve-surgery was practised by Lanfranc in Paris 
in the thirteenth century, and his successor, Monde- 
ville, has written with great foresight and wisdom: 
‘It is impossible that a surgeon should be expert who 
76 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 


does not know not only the principles, but everything 
worth while knowing about medicine, just as it is 
impossible for a man to be a good physician who is 
entirely ignorant of the art of surgery.” 

The excommunication of surgery aroused no popular 
outcry. Of all ages the medieval was one of acqui- 
escence. Pope Innocent III in 1215 prohibited any 
operation in which blood was shed, and at the close 
of the thirteenth century surgery was formally 
separated from medicine, and immediately declined in 
consequence. ‘The edict was absolutely final. For 
some time elementary surgical knowledge was handed 
on by priests to the barbers who shaved them, and 
who thus became the authorized bleeders. Under 
Henry VIII it was enacted that ‘No person using 
any shaving or barbary in London shall occult any 
surgery, letting of blood, or other matter except only 
drawing of teeth.” 

In 1540 the United Company of Barbers and 
Surgeons was permitted yearly the bodies of four 
executed persons for dissection! So profound was 
the respect in the sixteenth century for the study 
of anatomy. Can one be surprised that as surgery 
vanished medicine ceased to be acquainted with the 
formation or functions of the human body and placed 
its faith in such flights of optimism as the cure of 

77 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





obscure disorders by the powder of disinterred 
mummies? 

Henceforth medicine was tolerated only so long 
as it conformed to theological edicts regarding the 
supernatural origin of disease. The shadow of pre- 
destination robbed life and death of any spirit of hope 
or curiosity. It relegated accurate knowledge to the 
kingdom of delusion and ultimate damnation. 


Vv 

It is unfortunate that the struggle between official 
Christendom and the forces that represented in their 
widely antagonistic ideals the spirit of revolt—the per- 
secution of witch, heretic, and scientist together—has 
been obscured in Protestant history by the warmth of 
religious prejudice. Nothing has proved more con- 
genial and convincing than to condemn the Church of 
Rome out of the records of her persecutions; it has 
been the privilege of every corner orator since the 
Reformation. 

The Roman Church was not a remote tyranny 
holding men’s eager souls in bondage. The Church 
was the State and the State was the nation. It pre- 
sented the passionate beliefs of the vast majority of 
both intellectual and simple Christians. It did not 
78 


MAGIC AND MEDICINE 





act alone or against popular opinion in burning witch, 
heretic, and scientist. It simply expressed the doctrine 
it held according to the universal faith of the age. 
The spirit of suppression was universal, and in perse- 
cution the Reformerwas as enthusiastic as the Catholic, 
The sense of the enormity of pain was supported 
neither by spiritual nor popular credence. Even in the 
enlightened Victorian age the ancient conflict against 
the relief of natural and authorized suffering was more 
than smouldering. 

It is therefore beating the air to explain away the 
Middle Ages as the dark era of hypocrisy, malice, 
and a kind of epidemic of spiritual lunacy. It was 
admittedly an age of darkness, but of a darkness 
that was logical, not simply unfortunate. The 
shadow that enveloped the whole life and thought 
of Europe was the science of theology—that im- 
mense and formidable structure that conceived fresh 
ingenuities of hell-fire at the birth of the Reforma- 
tion. The ideal of the individualist was to break 
out of the forest of superstition and discover the new 
world. The ideal of the Christian Church was equally 
passionate. It was to defeat this fresh revelation of 
Satan in his new evangel of the glory of the earth. 

The Church nourished no malice or jealousy 
against the physician as an individual. It simply 


79 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


excommunicated him should he assume that the 
ailments of the body were natural and not super- 
natural, The Church had every admiration for the 
astronomer, but when he persisted in his heresy 
that the world rotated or the sun had spots the in- 
fallibility of divine revelation was threatened; and 
what was one man’s body where a million souls 
might be imperilled ? } 
The primary cause that drove the scientist into 
exile was not the Inquisition, but the philosophy 
of life which made the Inquisition its approved 
and historical instrument. Freedom of thought 1s 
a perilous enough doctrine, and met with little 
enough sympathy in medieval times. It was held, 
not without sound reason, that the ordinary man 
is a better follower than leader, and that the 
spiritual is a higher ideal than the material. What 
was arrayed against this grim and formidable power 
in Christendom? ‘There was the eternal instinct of 
mankind for the things of this present world, which 
was the bedrock of the philosophy of witchcraft. 


80 


GEAP GER LY 
FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 


I 

OWEVER much the scientist might trim 

his sails to meet the onslaught of the Papal 

gale, the historic witch was utterly doomed. 

Her time of security had passed away by the 
fourteenth century, leaving her the hapless rival of 
the Christian faith. To appreciate the fullness of 
her condemnation one must compare the philosophy 
of witchcraft with the theology of Rome. These 
two show at their most extreme points the pagan 
love of the world and the Christian adoration of 
heaven, or the sense of material as against spiritual 
values. The differences between them had, with 
the accumulation of one theological dogma upon 
another, grown beyond reconciliation. Then as 
now the function of morality in civilization cannot 
justify two masters, and the Christian faith was 
destined sooner or later to challenge the witch, 
since the sense of values preached by Christ never 
aimed at an easy or pleasurable life. Compare, 
F SI 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


therefore, the fundamental truths of Christian teach- 
ing with the philosophy of the witch. If it is any- 
thing, Christianity is a medium for correspondence 
between this world and heaven, and there is no 
authority whatever, Scriptural or philosophical, for 
believing the way is either broad or smiling. It has 
become a modern. phase of thought to interpret the 
Christian method as one of smooth and cordial virtues, 
whereas the supreme significance of Christianity in 
its relationship with the ancient world was revealed 
in the last scene at Calvary. The victory of death 
and the triumph of suffering were not, as the Jews 
imagined, a sordid termination to an eccentric dream, 
They were rather the dramatic confirmation of a pro- 
found and historic truth. The shadow of the Cross, 
erected in all its hideous barbarism against the falling 
sunlight of an Eastern sky, went down in darkness, 
to rise over the whole world of men. The Cross 
stood henceforth like the corner-stone upon which a 
vast building ultimately depends, and it was the stark 
vision of the Crucifixion that haunted the coming 
centuries. ‘The symbol of death was the path of life. 
The Cross was erected in the churches and cathedrals; 
it met the wayfarer upon the solitary road; it hung 
by the bedside of the devout, and came to be a kind 
of passport to spiritual preservation in the hands ot 
82 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 


the dying. No symbolism of the immense, perpetual 
presence of death has ever in other historic faiths 
worked so profound an influence. Other teachers 
have not been ignorant of the ethics of Jesus Christ. 
The fundamental principles were in general accepted 
and even practised before His day. In the growth 
of the early Church pagan ritual and the spiritual 
environment of the old world were grafted upon the 
new revelation, and still maintain their strange, in- 
congruous partnership. But, distinct from Egyptian 
philosophy, with its submission to the inevitability of 
death, from the Greek passion for the life that is, from 
Buddhism, with its tepid refuge now and hereafter, 
and from the Roman’s agnostic stoicism, Christianity 
proclaimed a message that in its pale radiance was like 
a new moon rising over a tired world. The words of 
Christ were destined to build up a science of theology 
as unwieldy as it was portentous. The attitude of 
Jesus to the temptations of the world sounded like a 
clarion note to mortification, asceticism, and seclusion. 
It developed into the weariness of religious orders and 
the gloom of death in life. It cast the shadow of a 
perpetual uneasiness over the most trivial actions of 
thoughtless men. “He that loveth his life shall lose 
it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep 
it unto life eternal.” 


83 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


If anything was obscure in the words of the Master 
it was not his attitude toward eternity. He en- 
couraged no happy death-bed conversion as a door to 
eternal bliss.) He never ceased to reiterate that the 
spiritual was won by the spiritual and the material by 
the material. Eternal life might be a man’s birth- 
right—it was not necessarily his destiny. 

In the first years after His crucifixion this martyred 
life and impending coming overwhelmed all else in 
the teaching of Christ. It became in time strength- 
ened and established as centuries passed and the sun 
rose, as it were, in perpetuity from year to year. The 
early Christians died in the ecstasy of a fresh exultant 
sacrifice that was keener than the happiness of earthly 
joys. ‘They passed, and still the Lord of the Dawn 
tarried. In the vigil of many years the impatient 
anticipation of the Day of Judgment faltered, and in 
its place there rose a Church which aimed at per- 
manence where its Creator had promised the last day 
of all, and strove for supremacy where its Founder 
had preached that the least of these are the greatest 
in the kingdom of heaven. But at its roots were 
smouldering a definite theology of hell-fire and a 
violence against the things of this world which at 
the end of the Middle Ages blazed into a fanaticism 
and persecution almost beyond the comprehension of 


84 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





the modern mind. The conception of Satan, the 
terror of damnation, predestined or otherwise, be- 
trayed a whole continent to panic and desolation. 
That out of the simplicity, the austerity, and the 
wide horizon of the teaching of Christ a Church 
should emerge and continue to emerge in varying 
degrees of bitter, dogmatic, and irrational bigotry 
must ever be an amazing and saddening reflection. 
It proclaimed with authority and reason eternal 
warfare between earth and heaven. 

Within the shadow of such an austere concep- 
tion theology established a god of ferocity and 
unslumbering vengeance. Instead of illimitable know- 
ledge it preached unending tribulation; instead of the 
mystery of spiritual perfection it described eternal 
misery; until there remained of Christian ethics 
nothing beyond the enormity of this earthly life, 
the purchase through Holy Church of the next, and 
behind them both, like a concealed voice on a tragic 
stage, the blazing wrath of an Almighty God. 

In face of that deluded spiritual conception the 
followers of the witch were the pioneers of the 
gospel of humanity. 

And yet the future darkened gradually. It has 
been observed that the early Church did not per- 
ceive in the old religion the enormities that produced 

85 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





the sinister presence of a medieval Satan. It has 
been shown that both monk and doctor were eager 
enough to adopt the primitive arts of healing practised 
by the wise woman, and that many pagan rites were 
grafted on to the ceremonials of Christian worship, 
and are there to-day. The tide was ebbing fast. 
To take a step farther, it is a remarkable fact that 
on the eve of this historical notoriety of the witch 
she was fallen into decrepitude and insignificance, 
She had been routed not by intention, but by pro- 
gress. Her decline was as natural and as timely as 
the fall of the leaf. As a witch she was a relic of 
the past. As a pawn in social and political affairs 
she had lost importance. Time and the township 
had set the old worship definitely in retreat. Medicine 
had challenged the magic of the witch. The 
Church carried the lamp of knowledge throughout 
the darkness of Europe. In truth, in that bright 
period of her establishment as the pilgrim of civiliza- 
tion, culture, and the purity of Christian ethics the 
hope of the world lay within her grasp. She was 
healer, spiritual comforter, and teacher. Where the 
doctor could not come the monk sat by the bedside 
of the peasant; where a stranger would have been 
slain the priest passed unhurt. Wherever the Cross 
was raised a curative centre was founded. 

86 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





The Church 


cried to the kings, Give, and gold was poured into her 
exchequers; she condemned a man who had defied her, 
and he had no longer a place among mankind; she pro- 
claimed a Truce of God, and the swords of robber knights 
were sheathed; she preached a crusade, and Europe was 
hurled into Asia. She lowered the pride of the haughty, 
and she exalted the heart ot the poor; she softened the 
rage of the mighty, she consoled the despair of the op- 
pressed. She fed the hungry, and she clothed the naked ; 
she took children to her arms and signed them with the 
Cross; she administered the sacraments to dying lips, and 
laid the cold body in the peaceful grave. Her first word 
was to welcome, and her last word to forgive. Inthe Dark 
Ages the European States were almost entirely severed 
from one another; it was the Roman Church alone 
which gave them one sentiment in common, and which 
united them within her fold. In those days of violence and 
confusion, in those days of desolation and despair, when a 
stranger was a thing which, like a leper or a madman, 
anyone might kill, when every gentleman was a highway 
robber, when the only kind of lawsuit was a duel, hundreds 
of men dressed in gowns of coarse dark stuff, with cords 
round their waists and bare feet, travelled with impunity 
from castle to castle, preaching a doctrine of peace and 
good will, holding up an emblem of humility and sorrow, 
receiving confessions, pronouncing penance or absolutions, 
soothing the agonies of a wounded conscience, awakening 
terror in the hardened mind. Parish churches were built : 
the baron and his vassals chanted together the Kyrie 
Eleison, and bowed their heads together when the bell 
sounded and the Host was raised. Here and there in the 


87 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


sombre forest a band of those holy men encamped, and cut 
down the trees and erected a building which was not only 
a house of prayer, but also a kind of model farm. The 
mons worked in the fields, and had their carpenter’s and 
their blacksmith’s shops. They copied out books in a fair 
J.and; they painted Madonnas for their chapel ; they com- 
posed music for their choir; they illuminated missals; they 
studied Arabic and Greek; they read Cicero and Virgil ; 
they preserved the Roman Law. Bright, indeed, yet scanty 
are these gleams. In the long night of the Dark Ages we 
look upon the earth, and only the convent and the castle 
appear to be alive. Inthe convent the sound of honourable 
labour mingles with the sound of prayer and praise. Inthe 
castle sits the baron with his children on his lap, and his 
wife leaning on his shoulder: the troubadour sings, and the 
page and demoiselle exchange a glance of love. The castle 
is the home of music and chivalry and family affection. The 
convent is the home of religion and of art. But the people 
cower in their wooden huts, half starved, half frozen, and 
wolves sniff at them through the chinks in the walls. The 
convent prays, and the castle sings : the cottage hungers, and 
groans, and dies. Such is the dark night : here and there a 
star in the heaven: here and there a torch upon the earth: 
all else is cloud and bitter wind. 


Here was the fatal philosophy of the witch. It 
was in the cottages that, with her secret arts and 
potions and her universal knowledge of good and 
evil, she was welcome as feudal oppression deepened. 
The Church seemed very far removed from the quaint 


1 Winwood Reade, Te Martyrdom of Man, The italics are mine. 
88 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 


terrors and old beliefs of the peasantry, who accepted 
what they could from Christ, but clung with pathetic 
insistence to the solace and freedom of a worship that 
during the misery of their serfdom was to provide at 
any rate the dregs of happiness. The material pros- 
perity of the Church did not render its authority less 
heavy or its doctrines less terrible. The discipline 
of Rome, like that of the Scots Kirk in later years, 
accompanied a man from his cradle to his grave. It 
did more; for whereas the baron was compelled to 
relinquish his serf at death the Church pursued him 
into purgatory. He must attend Mass or be fined ; 
he must pay for his sins, for his poor strip of land, 
for his wages, for the wool on his sheep’s back, and 
for the wayside grass; he must pay for a respite of 
spiritual torment, and bequeath his meagre goods to 
Holy Church on his death-bed. Life was dreary 

enough, but death no longer promised oblivion. 
What was the natural inclination of a peasantry 
steeped in immemorial superstition and driven to 
despair? Surely it was to turn with a desperate 
anticipation toward the natural excesses that still 
lingered in the traditional festivals of the old religion 
of nature. There is abundant evidence to prove that 
Christianity had barely touched the fringe of pagan- 
ism. Even at the end of the twelfth century the 
89 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





Bishop of Exeter discloses his knowledge of the 
prevalence of witchcraft in words that clearly in- 
dicate the existence of the ancient Dianic cult in 
England. 

He condemns 

whosoever, ensnared by the Devil’s wiles, may believe 

and profess that they ride with countless multitudes of 

others in the train of her whom the foolishly vulgar call 

Herodias or Diana, and that they obey her behests. 

Whosoever has prepared a table with three knives for 

the service of the fairies, that they may predestinate good 

to such as are born in the house.! 

Diana and the fairies! Between the two the witch 
had much to explain if she were to satisfy the courts 
of heaven. 


II 
The tragedy lay in the fact that after nine 
centuries of devoted labour the Church had failed 
to win the peasantry for Christ; already her energy 
was spent and her power was greater than her 
charity. Benedictus Levita wrote of that period: 
When the populace come to Church it shall only do 


there what belongs to the service of God. In very truth 
these dances and capers, these disgraceful lewd songs, 


+ Superstitions condemned in the Pcenitential of Bartholomew Iscanus, 
Bishop of Exeter (1161-86). See A Medieval Garner, by G. G. Coulton, 


go 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





must not be performed either in the churchyards or the 
houses of God, nor in any other place, because they remain 
from the custom of the heathen. 


The change of mind from the ninth century to the 
fifteenth is very remarkable. What the Church called 
with very natural reluctance “the custom of the 
heathen which was a description true enough— 
it hailed with an outburst of startled horror within 
five hundred years of concentrated theology as “a 
compact with the devil”? The truth is that the dis- 
covery of Satan was inevitable. The whole trend of 
doctrine had made his presence essential and spon- 
taneous. To deny his existence after such exhaustive 
investigations as those upon which the whole intellect 
of Europe was engaged would have been to doubt 
the universe or to deny the supernatural. 

The more these learned persons wrangled about 
the pains and penalties of hell-fire, the greater grew 
the movement of the miserable serf toward the 
witch. He stood in peril of losing both earth and 
heaven, and he snatched in his despair at a pre- 
carious present rather than at a portentous future. 
He crouched under the spiritual shadow of the 
monastery and the physical shadow of the castle. 
They were all the message Christianity extended to 
him. He had no freedom, no pride, and no hope. 

gl 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





He was born into a slavery from which there was 
no escape. His life and his poor possessions were 
at the mercy of bishop or lord. His daughters, 
if they were comely, were dragged to the castle 
before his eyes. He lived, without expectation, 
where there was nothing but perpetual servitude 
and dishonour for him and his. ‘Even in the 
seventeenth century,” records Michelet, “the great 
ladies died with laughing when the Duke of Lorraine 
told them how, in peaceful villages, his people 
went about harrying and torturing the women.” 
Centuries before there was no solace except in 
the philosophy of the witch. Had the Church 
challenged the iniquities of those barbarous days, 
had it set its benediction upon the light of learning 
that was struggling out of the East, the Reformation 
would never have taken place, the Renaissance would 
have been hastened by a thousand years, the witch 
would not have perished with the scientist nor the 
man of letters with the bewildered peasant. 

And so the serf clung to his old faith where all was 
darkness,and becauseof his wretched plight he became 
secretive and haunted by a sense of his own audacity. 
Ancient customs took new life, and were gradually 
transformed. What had been natural and unaffected 
was become desperate and sinister. The philosophy of 


g2 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





witchcraft approached happiness by stealth. The serf 
became banded with his fellow-slaves into a sect apart 
from monastery or castle. If these were Christian he 
would cling to the witch and the old ceremonies, which 
the Church had begun to denounce as the worship of 
Satan. This invention of one devil where there had 
hitherto been a multitude was like a two-edged sword. 
It sank so deep into the national consciousness that it 
obsessed a vast number who were learning to look upon 
the figure of Christ with horror and hatred. When 
the monastery and the castle were silent under the 
moon the dark forms of the serfs crept under the trees 
to the appointed place. There they declaimed their 
wrongs and defied their oppressors, and after a night 
of organized riot returned in the pale dawn to their 
eternal drudgery. 


iil 

Within the homes of such miserable people the 
philosophy of witchcraft developed. Behind closed 
doors and round a dancing fire old, wonderful tales 
were retold, old songs were sung, and a refuge found 
in the land of make-believe, that country of dreams 
that never come true. ‘To-day fragments profoundly 
beautiful in their simplicity and grandeur are collected 
as things more precious than gold, and reveal a 
93 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





common gift of tongues which perished under the 
blight of religious condemnation, Inseparably linked 
with the witch was her foster-sister the fairy. The 
witch was a physical fact and the fairy an imagina- 
tive consolation, but both ministered to the eternal 
spirit of wonder. 

Across the sky the dark clouds sweep, 

And all is dark and drear above ; 

The bare trees toss their arms and weep. 

Rest on, and do not wake, dear Love. 

Since glad dreams haunt your slumbers deep 

Why should you scatter them in vain? 

Dreams all too brief, 


Dreams without grief, 
Once they are broken, come not again.! 


In this sense 





and it was a very real and tragic sense 
to those in bondage—the yearning of the human 
heart for an escape from reality discovered in magic 
a refuge from the world. 

There is, therefore, in this aspect of the poetic in 
paganism something very beautiful and haunting. It 
was the conception of the witch as the last priestess 
of nature that inspired Michelet to canonize her in 
La Sorciere. She was of the common people, and 
it is the voice of the common people that he hears 
behind the roar of leaping flames. 


* Rosa Newmarch, Hore Amoris (Elkin Mathews), quoted by the 
courtesy of the author and publisher. 


04 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 














But it was her sister the fairy who played the more 
innocent part. In these enterprising days, when it is 
thought necessary to photograph fairies as an evidence 
of their reality, it is not an easy thing to estimate the 
part they played in the imaginative background of all 
pastoral peoples. Whatever their actual origin—and 
possibly they are a lingering memory of the prehistoric 
dwarf folk who were driven underground by advanc- 
ing tribes—fairies are present in the storehouses of 
nearly all primitive races. It is conceivable that from 
practical slavery the original dwarfs became long after 
their extinction the symbols of spontaneous industry 
and also the pixies of irresponsible mischief. Their 
mysterious existence underground would linger in the 
idea of fairy mounds; their servitude would become 
the housewife’s dream of the little people who work 
in the night; and their natural spite toward their 
strong oppressors would be exercised in petty degra- 
dations. However that may be, the idea of the fairy 
is a practical reaction against the ceaseless tedium of 
getting up and a protest against the confined monotony 
of the day’s work. In their company poverty, sick- 
ness, oppression were accepted because of the glamour 
of that kingdom of Faerie which none could take 
away. When the little people were driven into exile 
the candle of the peasantry flickered and went out. 

95 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


Because the fairies meant to the poor the things 
that dreams bring—the life that means more than 
daily toil—they were like a spiritual document against 
an age of misery. It has been observed how after 
the hard day all simple folk tell or compose wonder- 
ful and incredible stories; and the more intolerable 
their lives the more finely the evening tale is dressed. 
The hovel becomes a palace; Cinderella goes to the 
ball; rubbish turns to gold; and the castle that they 
must bow their heads before until sunset becomes 
just “a big rough cave with water oozing over the 
edges of the stones, and through the clay; and the 
lady, and the lord, and the child, weazened, poverty- 
bitten craturs—nothing but skin and bone, and the 
rich dresses were all rags.” 

This passionate longing for transformation is 
the basis of the ancient fairy tale. The desire to 
get away from a life that was unbearable produced 
the ideal of the fairy who performed the drudgery 
to give respite and carried the magical ointment 
which, rubbed on the eyes, presented a new 
heaven and a new earth. Of such vain hopes 
and actual forbidden assemblies the cottage whis- 
pered, while all Christendom was given up to the 
evil of mortal life and the immensity of death. 
The story-teller could not expect much sympathy. 
96 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





A contemporary writer, dealing with the cause of 
witchcraft, mentions 


old wives’ fables, who sit talking and chattering of 
many false old stories of witches and fairies and Robin 
Goodfellow, and walking spirits and the dead walking 
again; all of which lying fancies people are more natur- 
ally inclined to listen after than to the Scriptures. 


The fairy died, but she died hard. She retained 
to the last the delicate sense of beauty elusive and 
tender, while the witch was driven to evil and hatred. 

Chaucer compliments with a nice irony the monks 


on their expulsion: 


In old time of the King Artour, 

Of which that Bretons speken great honour, 
All was this land fulfilled of faerie ; 

The Elf queen, with her joly company, 
Danced full oft in many a grene mead. 
This was the old opinion, as 1 rede— 

I speake of many hundred years ago, 

But now can no man see no elves mo. 

For now the great charity and prayers 

Of limitours,! and other holy freres, 

That searchen every land and every stream, 
As thick as motes in the sunne-beam, 
Blessing halls, chambers, kitchenes, and boures, 
Cities and burghes, castles high and towers, 
Thropes and barnes, sheep-pens and dairies, 
This maketh that there ben no fairies. 


1 Friars limited to beg within a certain district. 


G 97 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





needed all the goodness he had, love put softening in his 
heart, and he carried her down to the sea and let her 
swim away to her own kith and kin, where she ought to 
be. And she spent that night, it is said, on a reef near 
the shore singing like a daft mavis, and this is one of her 
croons—indeed, all the seals are good at the songs, and 
though they are really of the race of Iochlann, it is the 
Gaelic they like best.} 


IV 

It would, however, be inaccurate to represent even 
the poetic philosophy of witchcraft as innocuous until 
it was driven to retaliation. Old desperate customs 
were there with old songs, and the tide was running 
toward despair, and out of despair arose the harsh 
tongue of revolution. 

Michelet? is of the opinion that the serfs were in 
the habit of meeting the witch or whoever presided 
at the sabbaths without any more definite motive 
than the desire for romance until the Peasants’ War 
of 1364. Henceforth the fire of rebellion smouldered. 
It was given definite inspiration in the hoarse chant- 


ing of 
Nous sommes hommes commes ils sont! 
Tout aussi grand cceur nous avons ! 
Tout autant souffrir nous pouvons. 


1 Marjory Kennedy Fraser, Songs of the Hebrides. 
2 La Sorciere. 


100 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 











Here was the faint cry which was to end with the 
Marseillaise. It was the soul of the common people, 
who followed Jeanne d’Arc because she was to them 
the incarnate goddess of the ancient faith. 

By the fifteenth century the forces arrayed against 
this philosophy of life were grown to immeasurable 
heights of fanaticism and gloom. Professor Mac- 


kinnon remarks: 


It was the age of obscurantism in things of the mind, 
the age of visions and miracles of saints, of the fighting 
bishop and abbot who could wield a sword, but could 
hardly read the alphabet, of lazy monks who lived on the 
fat of the land in ignorance and vice, of quibbling pedants 
in the schools who wasted their ingenuity on the discus- 
sion of such a mighty question as how many angels could 
stand on the point of a needle, of crusading hordes who 
mistook a holy war to recover the sepulchre of Christ and 
secure shiploads of relics of the true cross and other holy 
rubbish for the real warfare of loving one’s neighbour 
and attaining to the higher Christian morality. It had 
indeed its great conceptions, its soaring aspirations, as its 
mighty temples of stone show ; its feelings for humanity, 
its sense of duty, as the better aspects of Christian chivalry 
remind us; its fits of real devotion, as the self-sacrifice 
of a St Francis in the service of the miserable testifies. 
But the greatness of its Gothic architecture exhausted 
its intellectual greatness, and its Knights Templars and 
‘ts Franciscans at their best were not the exponents 
of the spirit of the age. It was in general an age of un- 
enlightenment. The modern spirit of liberty of thought 

IOI 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





and conscience could not have breathed freely, if at all, in 
that murky atmosphere of priestlyintolerance, crass super- 
stition, puerile pedantry. For those who rose above that 
murky atmosphereinto the ethereal currentof spiritual free- 
dom the world was a veritable purgatory, a worldof torture 
and misery, a world of sorrow, barrenness, and death. 

What men thought of that world of theirs we learn from 

Dante, and Dante sends pope and priest to the deepest 

inferno to expiate_their misdeeds. Much that we count 

great, much that we hold dear, pope and priest degraded 
and blasted. “The world was a desert. Its beauties, its 
charms, were snares. 

Between science according to the school of Salerno 
and mysticism according to the witch there existed 
little enough sympathy or understanding. To the 
Church they were simply two arms of Satan. The 
briefest consideration of the principal doctrines of the 
Church, then stronger than any state or monarch, 
will indicate how irreconcilable were the ideals of 
this world with the edicts of heaven. 

It has been remarked how soon the Cross took a 
supreme place on the horizon of Christian life and 
thought, with the resultant reaction against normal 
life. And with the sense of sin in this world there 
grew up in consequence the doctrine of hell-fire in 
the next. The ancients knew nothing of Satan or of 
eternal punishment. They feared death only as all 

1 A History of Modern Liberty, vol. ii. 
102 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





mortal flesh shrinks from annihilation. But with Satan 
at every man’s elbow, alluring the weak from the path 
of obedience, life became a perpetual warfare in a 
sense that was unparalleled in religious history. Fresh 
edicts of the Church rang out one after another like 
the sombre notes of mournful bells. From the cradle 
to the grave man was held hand and foot by the priest. 

All life was now seething with sin. The perpetual 
wrath of an almighty God slowly created by centuries 
of theological conferences fascinated and occupied 
every man of intellect. Were a painter ambitious to 
win fame his art was best directed toward pictures of 
pallid saints and lurid illustrations of Doom, Judgment, 
“the path of Salvation,” and scenes from hell, with 
the triumph of Satan over infants in perdition. To 
these the medieval preacher could point with appalling 
emphasis as witnesses of the final plight of indifferent 
church-goers. The carvers worked the same mourn- 
ful designs; the masons chipped gargoyles as hideous 
as nightmares. 

Beyond the citadel of the Church there was social 
and spiritual desolation. Life and death lay by one 
door only. Were any final proof of spiritual terror- 
ism required the doctrine of the eternal damnation of 
unbaptized infants was beyond misconstruction, for if 
the helpless infant perished how poor a chance had 

103 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





sinful men and women! Bellarmine, the most noted 
of Roman Catholic controversialists, writes, with a 
kind of awful acquiescence: “We must hold, by 
the Catholic faith, that infants dying unbaptized are 
absolutely condemned, and shall for ever lack not only 
heavenly but even natural happiness.” Let it be added 
in common fairness, however, that it was left for a 
Protestant, in Jonathan Edwards, to express their 
absolutely hopeless state of agony in terms beyond 
our modern comprehension. 

From childhood onward the feet of the believer were 
sorely beset by snares. A doctrineof peculiar ferocity, 
eagerly developed by the Protestants, created the 
monstrous belief that out of the hosts of men some 
were of the Elect and the vast majority were already 
damned by hereditary guilt. Well did a thirteenth- 
century heretic cry in the face of his accusers: “If J 
could lay hold on that God who, out of a thousand 
human beings whom he hath made, saves a single 
one and damns all the rest, then I would tear and 
rend him with tooth and nail as a traitor.” 

Such wild words were as spray on the wind. What 
concerned the Church was the preservation of its 
autocracy, in which, beneath all the corruption of the 
period, was the faith for which it would have perished, 
the faith for which in the hey-day of the Reformers 
104. 


FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS 





its priests were ready to die. The sacred duty of the 
Church pointed in one direction only, and that was 
toward the absolute downfall of heresy and witchcraft. 
These kindred foes of Christendom must be uprooted 
together, or none could say what might befall; and it 
must be allowed that the Middle Ages were hardly 
ready for raw speculative thought. Nor, to be just, 
must it be supposed from the vantage-point of an- 
other age that the Church with a colossal arrogance 
slammed the door of intellectual inquiry and truth in 
the face of a rebellious populace. It was notso. The 
Church, acting with absolute reason according to its 
lights, perceived in heresy and witchcraft not simply 
Satan in arms, but a revolution or degradation of 
thought quite alien to the spirit of the times. Religion 
was in those days the only important part of life. 
Devotion to the Church and what she represented as 
the Will of God was a patriotic creed. The heretic, 
therefore, not merely attacked the faith—he became 
an outlaw and an enemy of the social order. The 
witch, plying her ancient trade, was no better, and 
was reputed to be a good deal worse. Both were 
universally regarded by priests, judges, princes, and 
burghers as anarchists and traitors. The Church 
and the State were one. They stood together for 
the protection of society. 

105 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


Nor must one be persuaded by vague memories of 
the Inquisition in fiction that on the Roman Catholic 
side stood fiendish torture and on the side of heresy 
sublime courage. The only profitable purpose in 
the study of human error is the realization that 
human conscience is the tragic slave of environment. 
The majority of the heretical sects such as the Albi- 
genses, Dolcinists, and Flagellants had no more sense 
of inspiration than a Hyde Park orator, and a consider- 
able amount of bestiality as well. The Inquisition 
was established to recall such apostles of vague 
conceptions to Holy Church. It demanded repent- 
ance. Nothing else could stand between its victims 
and the rack. For that reason the witch fared less 
harshly with the Inquisitor than with the civil court, 
where confession of guilt was extracted by torture. 

The medieval point of view being so completely 
contradictory to the modern, the trumpet-call of 
the Church to demolish heresies and sorceries met 
with an astonishing enthusiasm. It is well enough 
to-day to picture under the cloud of fanaticism the 
persecuted figures of learning, poetry, science, and 
freedom of action. However noble their inspira- 
tion and however tragic their fate, the arts and 
sciences stood by common consent as the enemies of 
established and venerated things. 

106 


CHAE PERG, 
THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


I 

T was not until the twelfth century that the | 
witch, already falling into decline, was abruptly | 
shaken from the conventional surroundings of her | 
ancient calling and solemnly exposed as the secret 
servitor of the Prince of Darkness. The conse- 
quences of such a denunciation are without parallel 
in human history, and are still a source of bewilder- 
ment to-day. The witch passed immediately from the 
social to the historical stage. Whatever had passed | 
hitherto for ancient survivals or innocent amusement | 
or secret knowledge was henceforth Satanic. Faced | 
by this problem, the modern mind seeks in hysteria, 
Catholic intrigue, or actual existence of occult power 
for the solution of one of the greatest mysteries in 
human history. ‘To present-day thought the witch 
was either a crazy, misused old woman, or she actually 
exploited those dark secrets of the supernatural which 
are so terrible that they simply will not bear examina- 
tion! Where, then, did truth begin and fantasy end? 
107 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


The simplest course to adopt in an examination of 
the witch persecutions is to grasp and sympathize with, 
in the light of the medieval mind, the proven guilt 
of the witch. It is only a step once the hypotheses 
are understood to appreciate the secondary factor— 
namely, the gradual belief of the witch herself in 
the powers which she was proved to possess and for 
which, to clinch the matter, she was destroyed. 

The transformation of ancient pagan rites into theo- 
logical anathema was of slow but inevitable growth, 
and cannot have been ultimately anything of a surprise 
to a social order assured by centuries of accumulative 
reiterance that the world was the playground of the 
Devil, that sickness and plague were manifestations 
of his malevolence, and that all human emotions out- 
side the celebrations of Holy Church were wiles and 
snares of Satan, whose servants must consequently 
be hunted down for the salvation of Christendom. 
Furthermore, the dread of witchcraft gaining ground 
with extraordinary rapidity proved of far-reaching 
political importance by acting as a check upon the 
dangerous speculations that were already threatening 
the intellectual placidities of Europe. Heresy and 
witchcraft were naturally enough inseparable in the 
warfare with the enemy of Christendom. 

The wholesale massacre of the Albigenses did not 
108 


Ceo er 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 





serve to steady, but only to disturb still further, the 
perplexities of many. The dim stirring of the intel- 
lect was evident in the speculative fields of astrology, 
a subject with heretical boundaries and for which 
Galileo was todie. ‘Threatened by such ominous signs 
of revolt, in which the faithful saw the onslaught of 
Satan, the Church preached with ever - deepening 
menace the sin of all traffic with idle pleasures and 
wicked speculations. Distracted, allured, and terrified 
at once by the sensational infamy of the witch, men 
looked for Satan everywhere, and Satan duly appeared. 
Enjoying definite physical presence, his existence was 
at once beyond denial. Moreover, he was the Prince 
of Pleasure, the spirit of reaction against conformity. 
The very contrast between the droning monotony of 
the cathedral and the reputed ecstasies of a witches’ 
sabbath made men ponder in secret and imagine in- 
credible escapes from life. ‘They were both exhilar- 
ated and tortured by such thoughts, knowing them 
to be the wages of sin. More than that, a profound 
and psychological change was revolutionizing the 
witch and her followers. The peasantry, learning 
on the authority of their spiritual masters that the 
customs of their forefathers were a dangerous con- 
spiracy against the powers of throne and altar, were 
not reluctant to defy the Christian faith, which gave 

109 


THF PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





them nothing but servitude and low wages, and take 
their chance with this new Prince of Darkness, who 
was admittedly a hater of priests and a lover of 
license. 

In the fourteenth century a culminating wave of 
terror swept Europe in the Black Death. It is esti- 
mated that a fourth part of the whole population 
perished from this mysterious and horrible affliction. 
The victory of Satan was surely near at hand. With 
extraordinary lack of foresight it was proclaimed 
from every pulpit in Europe. Frantic with fear and 
lost to any further hope of divine assistance or mercy, 
their God actually defeated, great numbers for the 
first time began to see in the Devil the king of the 
earth. In the Black Death whole congregations 
perished, and the diminished company of priests, en- 
riched beyond measure by the wealth that had been 
poured on their altars for the gift of immortal life, 
were sunk either in apathy or utter despair. 

The Reformation dawned; and whatever its eventual 
destiny it was as firmly established upon the rock of 
infallibility and the abomination of heresy. ‘There 
was no safe refuge now for philosopher or scientist, 
doctor or man of letters. Flying from the Inquisition, 
the unhappy Servetus, the eminent forerunner of 
Harvey in his theory of the circulation of the blood, 
110 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


was trapped by Calvin and burnt. Toward such 
pioneers the only difference in point of view be- 
tween Romanists and Reformers was that, whereas 
the former linked Protestantism with heresy, the 
latter united the witch with the Catholic. Both were 
allied against freedom of thought, and both had a 
contempt for the kind of toleration that is now at once 
our national pride and embarrassment. ‘* Whoever 
shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and 
blasphemers to death,” wrote Calvin, in his amiable 
way, “will, knowingly and willingly, incur their very 
guilt. This is not laid down on human authority ; it 
is God that speaks and preaches a perpetual rule for 
His Church.” 

In this fashion witchcraft became a philosophy, with 
a literature of its own. In an age when all intellec- 
tual speculation was restricted to theology and when, 
outside doctrinal argument, all subjects were suspect, 
the study of the witch became a new science, with 
schools of research from Rome to Paris and Paris to 
Aberdeen. Evidence was gathered and collated from 
every country in Christendom. The faster it was cata- 
logued and approved the faster it poured in. It was 
universal, and therefore supernatural. What other 
explanation could account for a ritual independent 
of language, locality, and human propaganda? The 


III 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








Reformer of Scotland was agreed with the Inquisitor 
of Spain upon at least one point: the existence of 
the Satanic cult was not local but universal, and 
was proved to the hilt by evidences of the same rites, 
the same ceremonies, the same confessions, whether 
they were collected in Scots dialect or in the patois 
of the Pyrenees. The point was incontrovertible 
so far as it went. The witch organization resembled 
freemasonry, with common bonds and customs be- 
yond race or language, and given the hypothesis that 
Satan was a grim and vital reality, and not a mystical 
term for naturalism, there was suflicient evidence to 
depopulate the serfdom of a continent. 

With the two supreme religious bodies in Europe 
united in the condemnation of all the witch repre- 
sented, the Papal Bull of Innocent VIII, in which 
all the evil pretensions of the witch were laboriously 
set forth, made a definite step in 1485 toward 
systematic suppression. The Inquisition, a highly 
skilled body founded to bring heretics (not witches 
proper) to repentance, very speedily accustomed its 
courts to the expert knowledge and examination of 
both. Sprenger, an Inquisitor of considerable energy 
and no sense of scepticism, conducted what might be 
called a publicity campaign in order that the epidemic 
of magic might receive an adequate antitoxin. He 
112 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 





wrote an immense book, Malleus Maleficarium 
(“The Witches’ Hammer”), in which all the signs 
and varieties of witches are carefully explained and 
the proper methods of diagnosis gravely enumerated. 
From this, the greatest standard work ever based 
upon a misinterpretation, it was practically impos- 
sible for the accused, guilty or innocent, to escape. 
Sprenger’s conclusions led him to the interesting 
belief that the real menace of witchcraft was due to 
the wretched frailty of women, and therefore the war- 
lock or head of the assemblage hardly suffered at all. 
He was the first to raise a remote and non-Christian 
survival of the Dianic cult into Antichrist. He 
made it his business to turn what was chaotic into 
what was concrete, and revealed a startling enough 
state of affairs. The Inquisition, not composed, as 
so many earnest Protestants imagine, of a masked 
band of persons selected for their inhuman ferocity, 
but the most brilliant legal council of the day, was 
ordered to convict the witch upon the evidence 
afforded. With such a fatal court moving hither 
and thither, and confronted everywhere by the same 
evidence of Satanic worship, the Church reaped an 

ever greater harvest of witchcraft and heresy. 
What, then, provided the evidence that satisfied the 
conscience, not simply of priests and ministers, but of 
H 113 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


laymen with no grudge against helpless women, some 
of them tottering with years, and children of thirteen 
and upward? 

The answer is twofold. The belief in witchcraft 
as a penal offence was ordained by the Christian faith, 
Catholic or Reformed. Therefore the witch existed, 
and accordingly must be destroyed. Secondly, the ac- 
knowledged ritual-of the witches could be explained 
on no more reasonable grounds than the worship of the 
Devil, since the Devil was very prevalent and who else 
could the witches worship ? 

The first standpoint supplies the second. But 
how was it that the witch had been tolerated so long? 
For centuries, whether as wise woman, doctor, priest- 
ess, or incarnate fairy, she had been recognized or 
discouraged or simply ignored by Christianity. The 
explanation is that in the early centuries she was too 
strong to be crushed, but in the beginning of the 
Middle Ages she was utterly helpless. Her doom 
was consequently assured when Satan became for a 
period the greatest protagonist in religious history. 
She was his counterpart on earth, and her release 
came only when human credulity lost touch with the 
crude realities of heaven and hell. 

Let the first point be considered. Upon what 
authority was the witch condemned as an individual? 


114 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


——— 





Her death-warrant was in Holy Writ. Now unless a 
man thirsted for the stake he could not deny the Holy 
Scriptures, and the historic witch perished upon a text. 
The smoke of countless fires rose in a cloud over 
Europe (and never so fiercely as in Scotland) because 
Moses, in his desire to secure political prestige for 
the authentic prophets of Israel, discountenanced all 
amateur soothsayers and magicians a words: 
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 
xxii, 18). These eight words, plucked from their 
civilization and their political significance, became 
henceforth little better than a death-warrant in the 
pocket of every Inquisitor, Reformer, civil judge, or 
venomous busybody. ‘They were, at a time when 
the Bible was a locked book, written in an unknown 
tongue, containing the prohibitions of a most choleric 
and unreasonable God, the soul of brevity and the 
breath of authority. They were irrefutable where 
none dared to argue, and to be accused was to be 
condemned. All that was required were the proofs 
of the practice of witchcraft. The text from 
Exodus is therefore like a corner-stone in the whole 
structure of witch trials, and it is not without a 
tragic humour that its accurate meaning was not 

even fairly comprehended. 
It has been remarked in an earlier chapter that the 
115 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








witch of paganism could not have been dethroned 
without the entire dismemberment of the old reli- 
gion. She was its evil, but also its good genius; 
its magician, but also its priestess; its poisoner, but 
also its healer. Witches there had always been. 
They were an accepted part of human nature. The 
presence of the witch might have become upon 
occasion a cause of embarrassment— it could hardly 
have been one of serious concern. She held no anti- 
religious creed, and was never declared the foe of any 
established faith, There is no evidence whatever 
to prove that the premedieval witch plotted against 
Christianity until she was hunted to death. It should 
for that reason be obvious that the circumstances of 
the command of Moses were peculiar. The Hebrews 
were inclined to consult witches regarding the future, 
according to the acknowledged purpose of magic. 
Nor was there any criminal action in prophecy, since 
the Hebrews had their own approved prophets. 
The crime lay in patronizing unauthorized sorcery, 
and thus denying the established oracles. The witch 
was the unqualified prophet of those early days, and 
was therefore beyond the professional pale. But 
there was no idea of spiritual warfare. There was 
no talk of Satan, for the simple reason that Satan 
was still a spiritual abstraction and not a physical 
116 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


presence. Nor was the guilt of Saul in seeking 
knowledge of the future or in consulting a diviner. 
It lay in seeking prophecy from an improper source. 
Had the activities of witches been more reprehensible, 
or witchcraft more heinous, it is to be presumed that 
the references to them in the Bible would have been 
more numerous. Even St Paul, no lenient man, does 
not refer to the practice except with a casual and 
cursory comment. 

The familiar narrative of Saul (1 Samuel xxviii, 6) 
is as follows: 

‘¢ And when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord 
answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, 
nor by prophets. 

«Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a 
woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to 
her, and enquire of her.” 

And finally the consequences are clear enough: 

“‘So Saul died for his transgression . . . against 
the word of the Lord, which he kept not” (1 Chr. 
bee 

Il 

The second point—namely, given the express 
authority of the Almighty to hunt down witches, 
wherein lay the evidence of their pact with Satan? 
—is to be resolved by a study of the trials in the 


117 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


—_— 





light of certain hypotheses. In simple words, given 
a genuine belief in Satan, did the evidence sustain 
the charge? 

The investigation of these documents—which have 
seemed to the superior person so utterly contemptible, 
to the resolute sceptic a flagrant instance of ecclesi- 
astical conspiracy, and to the norma] humble person a 
mental aberration—should therefore be directed from 
the vantage-point of the pre-Christian pagan faith. 

There can be little question that the witch cult 
was in direct succession to the most primitive of all 
faiths—the worship of Janus. With him was Diana, 
the leader of the witches. As Miss Murray has 
pointed out: 


As Janus Quadrifrons he presided over cross-roads. 
It must surely be more than a coincidence that the Italian 
two-faced god of fertility should be the patron of cross- 
roads, and that the two-faced god of the witches should 
preside over fertility rites which were celebrated at cross- 
roads.? 


In the ancient religion innocent festivals with or 
without sexual rites were, and are still, a part of the 
life of pastoral peoples. The organization for cele- 
brations to the goddess of fertility is, for example, 
more or less rooted in every tribal system. The 


1 Folklore, vol. xxviii, No. 3. 


118 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 








evidence that burned the witch was therefore both 
comprehensive and consecutive. It presented, with- 
out the least suggestion of error to a continent crazy 
with the idea of the Satanic presence, the fundamental 
machinery of a secret society in the governing officials, 
the meeting-places, the dancing and licentious be- 
haviour, the accredited vows, spells, and magic of the 
witch. 

It is beyond challenge that the witch organization, 
or Dianic cult,! had certain established rites common 
to every district where it survived. These forms of 
ritual were simply survivals of the old pagan worship. 
The ancient faith, being a religion of fertility, de- 
manded an incarnate god or goddess who ultimately 
suffered sacrifice? at one of the sabbaths, a name in 
no way connected with Christianity. The sabbaths 
were held four times in the year. They were 
closely concerned with the periods of fertility in stock 
animals, and consequently, as in many primitive tribes 
to-day, both the wearing of skins and acts of sexual 
immorality were part of the actual ritual of the witches’ 
meetings. ‘The presence of an official leader at the 


1 See in this connexion Miss Murray’s invaluable study, The Witch 
Cult in Western Europe. 

2 There is some reason to believe that the legend of Lady Godiva, 
certainly not a historical account of the saving of Coventry, is a survival of 
the Druidical festivals in which the incarnate goddess was led to sacrifice, 


119 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





medieval sabbaths was in apostolical succession to the 
original high priest. This leader, when there were 
so many demons to placate, was dressed as the animal 
whose good offices were desirable." In later times, 
and when the Church had made Satan supreme in the 
things of this world, the Devil assumed chief place 
in the worship of nature. But he was canonized 
by the Church, not by witchcraft. ‘There had been 
alliances with numerous demons prior to the Middle 
Ages in the sense that a worshipper begged for 
security. But the historic spiritual and physical 
compact with Satan was a product of the medieval 
mind. It struck the sombre note that was symbolic 
of the age. Where all was become dark and 
secretive a witches’ sabbath was not incredible, but 
the most natural thing in Christendom. It was whis- 
pered wherever men met that, by a compact with this 
new Satan, the irreligious became rich and protected ; 
and doubtless the Devil won his followers quite apart 
from the services of the witch. 

The local witch society met under its leader, who 
represented the Devil in person, and was usually dis- 
guised. Associated with him were twelve officials, 
making the dread thirteen in all. These supplied the 


1 Any student of Red Indian customs will appreciate the significance of 
the dance ritual and their association with the traits of animals or birds, 


I20 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


“‘coyens,”! and the most cursory examination of the 
Scots or New England lists of the accused leaves it 
beyond dispute that the regulations of the organiza- 
tion in this respect were common toall countries. The 
coven, a system of elders which reminded Cotton 
Mather? of the ruling body of the Congregational 
Church, attended to the business of the cult and 
made the arrangements for its celebrations. The 
gatherings at the esbat were local, at the sabbaths 
more general. Many persons quite outside the 
genuine sect of paganism were known by the Church 
to seek relaxation and debauchery in the flickering 
lights of these gatherings of witches. Indeed, the 
presence of priests and men of high standing rendered 
the public exposure of a sabbath not without its em- 
barrassments and its damaging social indiscretions. 
Above the leaders of the local covens was occasion- 
ally a Grand Master (masquerading as the Devil), and 
it would provide a curious and attractive side-line 
of historical research to discover how far the secret 
schemes of such an important personage (whose name 
would be certainly carefully concealed) influenced his 
humble followers in the direction of anti-clerical and 
revolutionary movements. There is little doubt that 
1 Conventicles, 2 See The Witch Cult in Western Europe. 


3 See Miss Murray’s article in Folklore, vol, xxviii, No. 3. 
121 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


in Scotland John Fian,! head of the Berwickshire 
witches, died in horrible agony to preserve the life 
of the Grand Master, the Earl of Bothwell. The 
personal excitement of King James in this isolated 
case has been ascribed to his exaggerated sense of 
superstitious terror. It is no less dramatic, and prob- 
ably nearer the actual facts, to suppose that he be- 
lieved he could lay his hands on his arch-enemy and 
prove him guilty of high treason. 

The idea of a god incarnate, with its doctrine of 
ultimate sacrifice, is common to all primitive beliefs. 
Nor is it outside probability that many of the witches 
were martyrs in the sense that they welcomed death 
as the predestined price of a faith ancient when the 
Israelites crossed the Red Sea. In this peculiar and 
awful elevation the peasantry saw the fulfilment of 
their legendary beliefs. ‘There was nothing base or 
degraded in that. The association of Jeanne d’?Arc 
with the Dianic cult is a tragic and moving instance 
of the immeasurable inspiration of the pagan faith. 
Jeanne d’Arc, a child called at the familiar age of 
thirteen by voices near a sacred tree, was, as by the 
stroke of a magic wand, set at the head of a victorious 
army. She rode a black horse, and by her side was 
Marshal de Rais, the most famous and infamous of 

1 Which signifies “ fairy,” 
122 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 





—_———. 


the warlocks of France. ‘That she was a pure and 
innocent visionary is more than a cherished tradition 
—it is an imperishable truth. But to shrink from 
the very suggestion that Jeanne d’Arc might be in 
truth a white witch and not an authentic Christian 
saint is to confuse the whole idea and significance 
of the ancient religion, underlying which were the 
two eternal springs of the beautiful and the ugly, the 
natural and the supernatural. Riding at the head of 
her peasant army, Jeanne was radiant with the poetry 
and the loveliness of vision. At her side was the 
warlock De Rais, who had the vilest butchery of 
scores of children on his soul. But here were white 
and black magic incarnate, the good and evil in all 
human nature, older than religion, as eternal as man. 
The place of Jeanne d’Arc in history attracts century 
by century a deepening reverence and admiration. 
In particular has she won the devotion of men of 
letters and of poetry. Christian or agnostic, they all 
do her homage because of the spirit of beauty she 
brought back to the earth. And yet the mystery of 
her life and death abides and will probably never 
suffer intrusion. Why should a monarch of France 
listen to a simple peasant child? Why should an 
army, disheartened by defeat, follow a girl at the 
heel of dreams? Why should adoring soldiers accept 

123 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 











her death with such composure and let her pass as 
it were back to the country of infinite loveliness ° 
The solution of this sacred mystery lies perhaps in 
the inherent belief among an inarticulate peasantry 
that in the Maid there was sent from Tir-nan-og, 
that wonderful land of youth, the divine gift of 
inspiration and passion and beauty which is not 
destined to survive except in the hearts of men. 


Ii 

The most celebrated of all instances of Satanic 
worship was the notorious witches’ sabbath. Around 
this social and religious gathering there arose in an 
age destitute of historical antecedents a mass of data 
which accumulated into a mountain of evidence. It 
was believed (and confirmed) that witches flying upon 
broomsticks assembled to pay tribute to Satan, who 
was himself present, and that a physical compact was 
entered into. It was stated that at these meetings 
vows were taken, schemes hatched, spells weaved, 
blasphemies uttered, and Antichrist hailed as lord of 
the world. It cannot be denied that of such activities 
was the medieval witch cult. 

The explanation is to be found in the conservatism 
of the human mind and the persistence of human 
customs. ‘The witches’ sabbath was a survival of the 
124 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


times before the patriarchal system, when marriage 
was upon a group system and not monogamous, Being 
a simple folk-gathering, it existed in more modest 
forms until recently. The following is of importance 
as showing the innocent yet condemnatory appearance 
of such superstitious practices: 


We learn from Anna Mauczin (1600) that the witch 
gatherings were called Hochzezten, and treated as a type 
of marriage feast; we learn from Anna Kegreifen the 
names of the actual people (including the priest’s servant) 
who came to the dances; we find on the one hand dis- 
appointed or deserted wives and foolish village maidens, 
on the other village loafers and students from Tubingen, 
who joined in the midnight dances and the feasting and 
drinking beneath the Nunenbaum or by the well at the 
upper gate of Rotenburg. The trials bring out clearly 
enough who came to these witches’ sabbaths; how the 
usual piper was a well-known shepherd, but on some 
occasions one was brought specially from Tubingen. 
Here I will cite a few questions from a confession. ‘The 
supposed witch was asked if she had been at a witch 
dance and replied, ‘‘ Yes, for she was there initiated 
as a witch.” Who had taken her to it? ‘The old 
shepherd’s wife had fetched her, and they had gone 
with a broom.” Did she mean that they had flown 
through the air on a broom? ‘Certainly not; they had 
walked to Etterle, and then placed themselves across 
the broom, and so come on to the dancing green.” 
. . . Who were on the dancing green? ‘‘ Witches and 
their sweetheart devils.” Had she a sweetheart devil? 


125 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








‘Yes, the Sniveller.’? Did she not fear this devil? 
‘©No, he was only a sweetheart devil.” What was the 
difference? ‘The sweetheart devil was no real devil, 
only a witch’s sweetheart like the Sniveller, who was 
old Zimmerpeterle’s son.” 


And Dr Pearson concludes: 


Here we have a most remarkable confession showing 
that the witch gatherings were real meetings, that the 
women took with them the symbol of the old hearth or 
home goddess, the broom, that the devils were real men 
of the neighbourhood. Further, that the broom was 
ridden like a hobby-horse on to the dancing green. This 
riding of broom or the pitchfork, or even the goat, should 
be taken in conjunction with the riding of the hobby-horse 
or wooden goat round the village by the young men at 
peasant festivals in parts of Germany. Both seem closely 
connected with the worship of a female deity, whose 
symbols are those of the hearth and primitive agriculture. 
When we remember that the great witch dances to which 
students and even doctors of Tubingen used to go out 
were especially held on the eve of the first of May, how 
suggestive is the statement that people of quality in the 
old days used to go from London to dance in the villages 
of Essex on May Day.’ 


Secondly, it is highly probable that in many cases, 
especially those in which witches died a hideous death 
declaring they worshipped the Devil, hysteria, united 
with religious conviction, however false, did actually 
produce martyrs and not simply victims. 


1 Chances of Death, 
126 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


The religious and sexual importance of dancing in 
all primitive civilizations is a commonplace, and there 
is no doubt that under abnormal excitement trance 
conditions and hysterical phenomena presented the 
witch with a genuine or possibly fraudulent source of 
income and prestige. The most flagrant claims of the 
practice of sorcery were evidenced by the accused at 
witch trials, and it is easy to comprehend the result of 
such an attitude in a court fully convinced already. 
Self-hypnotism, actual faith in Satan, or sheer vanity 
may have influenced such appalling self-convictions. 

It must also be remembered that the sabbaths prob- 
ably produced phenomena as extravagant as those of a 
modern séance. In writing of the prophetic ecstasy of 
Syrian as well as Israelite prophets Dr T. H. Robinson 
refers to 


a peculiar psychic condition in which the subject seemed 
to be possessed of powers, indeed of a whole sphere of 
consciousness, which were denied to the ordinary in- 
dividual, and to the prophet himself in normal states. He 
did not cease to be conscious of the world as it appeared 
to others, but he heard and saw things which were be- 
yond their range. There were a number of well-marked 
physical phenomena connected with the condition of 
ecstasy, though these were not invariable. ‘The subject 
might be affected with a certain constriction of the 
muscles, in which case the state resembled that of a trance. 
On the other hand, muscular activity might be largely 


127 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





increased. Leaping, bodily contortions, and loud cries 
resulted, which, as they tended to become regular and 
rhythmical, developed into dancing and song. ‘The 
subject frequently experienced a kind of anesthesia, and 
would slash wildly at his own body with knife or whip, 
without showing any signs of physical pain." 

In this highly neurotic state, at a time when the 
nervous system was shaken with delirium and frenzy 
and the encompassing terror of capture, is it beyond 
comprehension that witches did honestly believe 
in their supernatural powers? To put it at its 
lowest, even vanity in the comfortable middle-class 
homes of England to-day is producing ambitious 
revelations of spiritual messages, apparitions, ghostly 
manipulations, and all in the most cosy and material 
atmosphere. 

It was therefore no wonder the witch imagined she 
flew to the meeting-place. It was part of the oldest 
legend of her faith that the great witches flew 
through the woods with Diana the huntress like a 
pack of unearthly hounds. 

Miss Murray remarks: 

The use of certain drugs produced profound physio- 
logical results and delusions. ‘The use of aconite (in the 


form of an ointment with belladonna) is in the opinion of 
Professor A. J. Clark likely to produce the impression of 


1 W. O. E, Oesterley, The Sacred Dance. 
128 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 








flying. Irregular action of the heart in a person falling 
asleep produces the well-known sensation of suddenly 
falling through space, and it seems quite possible that 
the combination of a delirifacient like belladonna with a 
drug producing irregular action of the heart like aconite 
might produce the sensation of flying.? 


One of the most baffling pieces of evidence at 
the witch trials of the Middle Ages concerned the 
legendary flight of the witches despite the contrary 
evidence that they had never left their beds. That 
the rubbing of ointments was an established custom 
is beyond dispute; that the ointments contained bella- 
donna and aconite is a fact; and the consequences 
must be left to the credulity or sceptical attitude of 
the reader. That a witch could transform herself 
into an animal would, were it conceivable, make a 
strong case for the intellectual acumen of the Middle 
Ages, but it is not carping to ponder upon the 
wretched and helpless condition of the witch in 
the hands of her enemies when a mouse could have 
stolen away, but hardly one prisoner escaped. 

A third strong argument in condemnation of the 
witch was the extraordinary similarity of evidence 
at trials widely distant. It is well enough for the 
modern sceptic to dismiss the whole business as an 


1 The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Appendix V, 
I 129 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





immense delusion dependent upon old women’s inco- 
herencies, but when the incoherencies are not merely 
common to every language, but are also compara- 
tively abstruse, can it be a matter for astonishment 
that superstitious courts were satisfied regarding 
the guilt of the witch? Had the court been able to 
arrest a fairy the unity of evidence would have been 
equally overwhelming. A fairy charged in Sweden 
would have pleaded the same fantastic folk-lore as a 
fairy taken captive among the Irish hills. 

The court was faced, therefore, by the existence 
of an actual organization which might or might not 
be Satanic, and furthermore by the evidence of a 
compact with the Devil. Now here was a curious 
instance of the adjustment of human beliefs to the 
evolution of theological doctrines. There is no 
evidence that the famous compact with Satan was 
recorded before the Church had hailed him as Anti- 
christ. How did this strange and repugnant idea 
take form? 

The medieval compact was celebrated with rites 
belonging to the old faith. There was a ceremony 
of ‘dancing customary in the ancient fertility festival. 
The disguised official acting as Satan (or whoever 
was the deity of the period) would bring up the tail 


in order that he might keep the pace active. Among 
130 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


the Ked Indians this personage wielded until recently 
a serviceable knobbed stick, and among our fore- 
fathers the familiar words “the Devil tak’? the 
hindmost ” may have conveyed a very definite mean- 
ing. Gideon Penman, a renegade Scots minister, 
“‘was in the rear in all their dances, and beat up all 
those that were slow.” A Scots witch was charged 
thus: ‘On Hallow eve last, and there, accompanied 
by thy own two daughters, and certain others, ye 
danced all together, about a great stone, under the 
conduct of Satan, your master, a long space.” 

The custom of meeting together especially in the 
month of May has an obvious explanation. It was 
in ancient times the admitted season for sexual 
intercourse. It became in more sophisticated days 
the time for village communities to make merry with 
the maypole in the day and dancing in the evening. 
This custom of assembling on May Eve existed in 
England until far into the nineteenth century, and was 
accompanied by music, feasting, and dancing. The 
use of masks, so important in the days of witchcraft 
both as a rite and as a disguise, also descended 
to a generation not long before our own. “In 
Wales the dancers are under the command of the 
Cadi, who is chief marshal, orator, buffoon, and 
money collector. . . . His countenance is particularly 


131 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





distinguished by a hideous mask, or is blackened 
all over; and then the lips, cheeks, and orbits of 
the eyes are sometimes painted red.” * 

It is a curious instance of the influence of con- 
temporary usages upon the decadent witch cult of 
the days of persecution that in its purely religious 
activities bastard imitations of current Christian cele- 
brations gave to the very name of a witches’ sabbath 
a definite sense of blasphemy and Antichrist. In 
Scotland the witches celebrated a sacrament, whereas 
in France it was the Black Mass. In Scotland too, 
as though there were not abundance already, the 
Devil, according to evidence in Pitcairn’s Trials, 
delivered a sermon, which is preserved, and in which 
he remarked: ‘Spare not to do evil, and to eat, 
drink, and be blyth, taking rest and ease, for he 
should raise them up at the latter day gloriously.” 

Finally, it must be admitted that within the witch 
society the genuine members remained staunch to 
each other and their faith. Traitors suffered for 
their betrayal. It was safer sometimes for a witness 
to abide in prison than go free, and even within the 
four walls of his cell he might be done to death. 

And yet, as the thoughtful even then realized in 
silence where speech was fatal, witchcraft flourished 


1 Hone, Everyday Book I, May 1. 
132 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 











most and was most dangerous (judging by the 
number of burnings) where it was most eagerly 
sought. In Salem, for instance, the Puritans had 
an eye keen as a razor for the Devil. But in 
Canada, then a Roman Catholic colony, they were 
for some reason or other lethargic in the gracious 
cause. 


Her peace was never much troubled by witches. They 
were held to exist, it is true; but they wrought no panic. 
Mother Mary of ‘ The Incarnation’ reports on one occa- 
sion the discovery of a magician in the person of a con- 
verted Huguenot miller, who, being refused in marriage 
by a girl of Quebec, bewitched her, and filled the house 
where she lived with demons, which the bishop tried in 
vain to exorcise. The miller was thrown into prison, 
and the girl sent to the Hétel-Dieu, where not a demon 
dared enter. ‘The infernal crew took their revenge by 
creating a severe influenza among the citizens.? 


Finally, and especially in England, there passed into 
social history the witch who suffered rough treatment 
principally upon the senilities of age and the brutality 
of the times. Here is the witch not of tragedy so 
much as of the fairy books, who, at any rate in 
English records, has discounted the profound and 
far-reaching significance of her Continental sister. In 
this solitary and hapless dame there possibly dwelt 


1 Francis Parkman, Te Old Régime in Canada (Macmillan), 
£33 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





some remnants of the oldest folk-lore in the world. 
It is likely enough that she possessed the attributes 
of the witch—that is, the use of herbs in sickness, 
the practice of a mild auto-suggestion and telepathy, 
possibly a dash of second sight (which now owns the 
resounding name of ‘cryptesthesia’), and a love of 
mystery. Vanity again has sealed more sentences 
of death than one might think: like her modern 
counterpart, she léarned to profess more than she 
could achieve. She surrounded herself with the 
atmosphere of the occult. She lived alone, was 
attended bya cat, and worked upon the simple minds 
of village maids by her dark and sinister falsehoods. 
It was said she flew by night, that she could become 
a toad or a mouse, and that she was beyond the touch 
of pain. Were such things true, then the witch was 
more interesting than her successors. But they were 
most tragically false. 

The most common and tragic side of the trials was 
conviction by personal evidence or confession. To the 
courts a witch was a witch whether she belonged to 
a coven, and might therefore be labelled genuine, or 
was simply a foolish old woman who attended the 
sabbaths with her friends and was no more authentic 
or more superstitious than any other old woman 
within the Roman fold. Or she might be altogether 
134 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 


ee eee 


innocent. A great number of the executions were 
the result of quite innocent persons being sworn to 
death by a prisoner frantic to win the leniency of 
the court. To weigh further the dice against the 
accused there grew up, with the obnoxious science of 
official witch-finding, a series of tests which convicted 
numbers of persons with no further proof whatever. 
It was believed that a witch was insensible to pins 
thrust into certain parts of her body’; that she was 
unable to weep or look an honest man in the eye; 
that she could not drown; that upon her would 
be found certain malformations. In Scotland in 


1 « There came then to Inverness one Mr Paterson, who had run over 
the kingdom for triall off witches, and was ordinarly called the Pricker, 
becaus his way of triall was with a long brasse pin. Stripping them naked, 
he alleadged that the spell spot was seen and discovered, After rubbing 
over the whole body with his palms he slipt in the pin, and, it seemes, 
with shame and fear being dasht, they felt it not, but he left it in the 
flesh, deep to the head, and desired them to find and take it out. It is 
sure some witches were discovered but many honest men and women 
were blotted and broak by this trick, In Elgin there were two killed ; 
in Forres two; and one Margret Duff, a rank witch, burn in Inverness, 
This Paterson came up to the Church of Wardlaw, and within the church 
pricked 14 women and one man brought thither by the Chisholm of 
Commer, and 4 brought by Andrew Fraser, chamerlan of Ferrintosh. He 
first polled all their heads and amassed the heap of haire together, hid in 
the stone dick, and so proceeded to pricking. Severall of these dyed in 
prison never brought to confession. This villan gaind a great deale off 
mony, haveing two servants ; at last was discovered to be a woman dis- 
guished in mans cloathes, Such cruelty and rigure was sustained by a 
vile varlet imposture.” (See The Wardlaw Manuscript, p. 446, Scottish 
History Society publication, Edinburgh .) 


135 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








particular such rubbish carried great weight, and un- 
scrupulous men were actually employed to hunt down 
women to be accused upon such trumpery charges. 
But that was persecution gone crazy and in decline. 
At the same time, the attitude toward the common- 
place witch of legend has its relation to the conclusions 
that are elaborated in the final section of this study. 
Superstition was perceived then more than now to be 
a grave lowering of the spiritual conception of life. 
It was realized by at least one writer that the associa- 
tion of trumpery phenomena with the supernatural is - 
confounded not by evidence, but by instinct. 
Reginald Scot remarks in his Discoverie of Witch- 


craft : 


I therefore do only desire you to consider of my report 
concerning the evidence that is commonly brought before 
you against them. See first whether the evidence be not 
frivolous and whether the proofs brought against them 
be not incredible, consisting of guesses, presumptions, 
and impossibilities contrary to reason, Scripture, and 
nature. See also what persons complain upon them, 
whether they be not of the basest, the unwisest, and the 
most faithless kind of people. Also, may it please you, 
to weigh what accusations and crimes they lay to their 
charge, namely: She was at my house of late, she would 
have had a pot of milk, she departed in a chafe because 
she had it not, she railed, she cursed, she mumbled and 
whispered ; and, finally, she said she would be even with 


136 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 











me; and soon after my child, my cow, my sow, or my 
pullet died, or was strangely taken. 

My greatest adversaries are young ignorance and old 
custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, 
it is so superstitiously pursued of some, as though no 
error could be acquainted with custom. But if the law 
of nations would join with such custom, to the mainten- 
ance of ignorance and to the suppressing of knowledge, 
the civilest country in the world would soon become 
barbarous. For as knowledge and time discover the 
errors, so doth superstition and ignorance in time breed 
them. 


IV 

The list of the condemned is a proof of the terror 
that had captured the medieval imagination. ‘“ Seven 
thousand are said to have been burned at Tréves, six 
hundred by a single bishop in Bamberg, and nine 
hundred in a single year in the bishopric of Wartz- 
burg.” About 1515 five hundred persons were killed 
in Geneva “as Protestant witches.” Four hundred 
died together in Toulouse in one day. It was the 
proud boast of a French judge that he had burned 
eight hundred women in sixteen years. In Como a 
thousand were killed in one year. In Lorraine an 
ecclesiastical competitor of the Nancy judge achieved 
nine hundred lives in fifteen years. 

The persecution of the witch is like a mirror 


137 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








revealing the political or religious convictions and the 
state of civilization of her oppressors.’ The Roman 
Church was united with the Protestant in one respect, 
since both found divine condemnation of the witch in 
the Old Testament. But where the Romanist re- 
cognized in the witch the actual presence of the Evil 
One and a practical opportunity for quelling the 
seething intellectual unrest of Europe, the Calvinist, 
with greater purity of inspiration, but an unqualified 
extravagance that obscured the real significance of 
the Reformation, beheld in her the supreme degra- 
dation of a sinful world. She became, therefore, the 
symbol of evil. From her upward all life was tainted 
with the Devil and dark with his wiles. Human 
history is made and unmade by strong and conflicting 
currents. The ancient warfare between the spiritual 
and material Utopia is as old as the sea, but the 
middle of the road has ever been the least accessible 
to wayfarers. ‘The witch stood for more than the 
victim of an obsession. She was after all the solitary 
voice of pleasure and common humanity and make- 
believe. Where the individual went down in a cloud 
of flames the old discredited instinct remained. The 


t A witch was burned in Southern Ireland as late as the last decade 
of the nineteenth century, and a wizard, to my own knowledge, practises 
a lucrative trade in a remote part of Wales to-day, 


138 


THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY 








Puritans alone fought it to a standstill. They stood 
to the last by an infallible Bible, and they will in 
future ages be judged according to their faith. They 
may have killed normal pleasure, but they at any rate 
gave a vein of iron to the constitution of a nation. 

The ancient antagonism between the things of 
heaven and the things of earth had in fact so narrowed 
its boundaries that in Puritanism the war on the world 
was triumphant beyond all precedent. The period 
has long since become a source of popular amusement 
for its grotesque and even revolting habits of conduct. 
But it should be estimated not by personalities, but 
by performance. The persecution of the witch was 
not so much the torment of an individual as the ex- 
pression of an ideal which, however contorted, drew 
its strength from the spiritual and not from the 
material, and produced in due season that wonderful 
age of faith, learning, and discovery—the Scotland 
of the nineteenth century. 


AS0 


CHAPTER VI 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 


I 

HE persecution of the witch in Europe is a 

historical presentation of ecclesiastical sup- 

pression rather than of spiritual abhorrence. 
To the Roman Catholic the path to eternity was 
through Holy Church. To the Scots Kirk it lay 
through the pure heart of each individual man; the 
spiritual was to be won by the sweat of purpose 
and the iron discipline of the flesh. The contrast 
is of superlative importance, because it established, 
if only for an era, the first and greatest instance of 
a nation in spiritual armour dependent not upon the 
absolution of man, but the uncertain acceptance 
of God. The attitude, therefore, of the Kirk to- 
ward the witch was the attitude of a stern and 
ruthless creed toward the disintegrating lures of this 
present life. It forms a historic instance of the 
moulding of national character, and all that signifies 
in civilization, upon an ethical belief in man’s place 
in the universe. 
14.0 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





The narrative of witchcraft in Scotland presents no 
particular points of variance from Continental records. 
It has been suggested by Burton that the witch per- 
secutions reached their height in Scotland owing to 
the fanaticism of a mountainous people in whose 
gloomy imagination the powers of nature were ever 
present and actual. This theory, however attractive 
on the surface, is hardly borne out by the preponder- 
ance of witch trials in the vicinity of Dunbar and the 
absence of the witch scare beyond the Highland Line, 
thus proving once again that witches were classified 
by law and not by environment. The Highlanders 
of the fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, 
speaking another tongue and inured to war, were 
sufficiently dangerous neighbours to chill even a Re- 
former’s ardour, and consequently the witch suffered 
most where she was most likely to be found, and 
that was within the range of the greatest number of 
Puritan ministers. Nor was the landscape terrific 
or portentous. Stage thunder did not roll from one 
calamitous valley to another. No prospect could be 
more peaceful and less ominous than the quiet 
stretches of the Lammermuirs. Sunlight flashes on 
the sea between the coast-line and the Bass. The 
brown woods are like a cloak cast over the shoulder 
of the hills; the landscape is serene and placid. Yet 


141 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 











here, within this pleasant place, the smoke of many 
a burning could be seen by ships bound for the Firth 
of Forth. 

The fate of the witch in Scotland is not a pleasant 
page in religious history. It has given innumerable 
openings for shafts of satire and moral indignation, 
and has added another chapter to the mournful record 
of persecution in the name of Christ. And yet the 
ultimate end was justified by the means. The Kirk 
declared war on the things the witch practised, and 
stood by her guns when the rest of Christendom 
was in lamentable retreat. Her tragedy may have 
been one of error—it was never one of faith, for no 
men have ever endured more for conscience than the 
ministers of Scotland. 

In the end in our own day the long conflict has died 
away from an exalted if exaggerated passion and 
spiritual agony to the paralysis of no spiritual ideal 
whatever. Out of bloodshed comes bloodshed, but 
also out of lethargy comes extinction. 

The causes of the extreme severity directed against 
witchcraft in Scotland were inevitable in a race of 
strong and ruthless temperament and inflamed by the 
doctrines of Calvinism. But even then the crusade 
was not democratic in its origin. The Reformation 
in Scotland was in its origins not an upheaval of the 
142 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





people. It was, if anything, unsympathetic to a 
peasantry ground down by feudalism and satisfied 
with a spiritual mixture of Roman Catholicism and 
witchcraft. The Reformation in Scotland was as 
much political as religious. The wealth and power 
of the Church were a larger incitement to the greedy 
Scots nobility than the thirst for liberty of conscience, 
and in the eclipse of the Papacy and the triumph of 
Puritanism one ecclesiastical tyranny was replaced by 
another infinitely more arduous. Under the Church 
of Rome the people had lived in oppression and 
spiritual tyranny, but they had retained some of the 
privileges of human beings. So long as they were 
orthodox they were assured of a certain degree of 
protection here and hereafter. It is true that they 
weret aught to have a superstitious dread of an in- 
fallible Church, but under the Reformed faith the 
infallibility of the Church was replaced by the in- 
fallibility of the Bible. Henceforth all happiness was 
denounced as sin; all the past was the reign of Satan; 
all the future was dark with guilt. 

It can be urged that this worship of the Bible as 
the indisputable Word of God did not merely revolu- 
tionize national thought—it transformed an entire 
nation, creating a spiritual wilderness and denouncing 
every aspect of normal life. It can be added that 


143 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








henceforth until the end of the nineteenth century 
the Scots nation lived according to the tribal laws of 
Israel. It has been pointed out in support of this 
contention that when the Highlands, the home of a 
passionate and romantic race, came under the shadow 
of Presbyterianism the philosophy of witchcraft fled 
away and the symbols of a heroic people became the 
tall hat and the tin bell. 

On the other hand, such ruthless spiritual tyranny 
imposed upon the most indomitable race in the world 
ought, according to the laws of human psychology, 
to have inspired a swift and violent revolution. In-_ 
stead the Kirk became the citadel of Scottish faith 
and liberty. In the long struggle against a savage 
and grasping nobility it was the Kirk that stood with 
indomitable purpose for the people. Her doctrines 
were harsh and sombre, promising little enough 
comfort here or hereafter, but they became the 
rallying-ground for a spiritual ideal so determined 
and invincible that kings, nobles, and bishops were 
swept away in its victories, and in its days of defeat 
the martyrdom of the Covenanters still haunts the 
lonely countrysides. 

However strange the paradox in this uncouth and 
oppressive creed, there was in its spiritual discipline 
the breath of liberty and the birth of a nation. 


144 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 


Il 

The witch provided the infant Kirk with a most 
serviceable object lesson. She enabled it to attack 
Satan in the very citadel of the last refuges of the 
Roman faith and stamp out superstitious practices 
masquerading under God’s name as well as Satan’s. 
That the problem of dealing with the witch presented 
few difficulties will best be understood by some 
acquaintance with the authority of a Scots minister 
within the bounds of his parish. 


According to the Presbyterian polity, which reached 
its height in the seventeenth century, the clergyman 
of the parish selected a certain number of laymen on 
whom he could depend, and who, under the name of 
elders, were his councillors, or rather the ministers of 
his authority. They, when assembled together, formed 
what was called the Kirk Session, and this little court, 
which enforced the decisions uttered in the pulpit, was 
so supported by the superstitious reverence of the people 
that it was far more powerful than any civil tribunal. 
By its aid the minister became supreme. For whoever 
presumed to disobey him was excommunicated, was de- 
prived of his property, and was believed to have incurred 
the penalty of eternal perdition. Against such weapons, 
in such a state of society, resistance was impossible. 
The clergy interfered with every man’s private concerns, 
ordered how he should govern his family, and often 
took upon themselves the personal control of his house- 
hold. Their minions, the elders, were everywhere, for 


K 145 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





each parish was divided into several quarters, and to 
each quarter one of these officials was allotted in order 
that he might take special notice of what was done in 
his district. Besides this spies were appointed so that 
nothing could escape their supervision. Not only the 
streets but even private houses were searched and ran- 
sacked to see if anyone was absent from church while 
the minister was preaching. ‘To him all must listen and 
all must obey. Without the consent of his tribunal no 
person might engage himself either as a domestic servant 
or as a field labourer." 


The discipline of the Kirk was inexorable. It 
suffered neither high nor low to escape the severity 
of its penalties. In the Booke of Universal Kirke 
it is mentioned that one Paul Methuen, having 
suffered excommunication for a certain offence, was 


restored 


upon his serious supplication and great expressions of 
sorrow, and released thus: two severall Sabbath dayes in 
Edinburgh, Dunie, and Jedburgh, both dayes in sackcloth, 
standing before sermon at the church door barefooted and 
bareheaded, and the last of the two, when he is absolved 
and released, layes aside that habite, and is embraced in 
his own habite, yit not to be admitted to the Lord’s Table 
while he report to the nixt General Assembly in December 
sufficient testimoniale of his repentance, publict, and also 
of his private Christian carriage. 


The discovery of the witch was no less stupendous 


1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol, iii, 


146 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 








because she had always existed. For in her exposure 
the Kirk, like all contemporary Christendom, saw a 
most vital method of routing Satan not merely in a 
proven organization, but in the more elusive hearts 
ofmen. But there wasa difference. ‘To the Church 
of Rome the whole affair was tinged with heresy and 
political menace; to the Church of England, ever 
good-natured and yet dutiful, the episode was like 
an incomprehensible indiscretion of the Almighty ; 
but to the Kirk of Scotland the witch was the sin of 
the world. Her fate was therefore both merciless 
and certain. In a land where the minister was 
omnipotent and omniscient, and where he even 
claimed to be the mouthpiece of God, there was 
no chance of escape and no encouragement to 
conceal. | 
Moreover, the swift overthrow of the Roman faith 
had come too suddenly for simple people to realize 
that all that had gone before was iniquitous and 
devilish, whether it sprang from priest or witch. 
Here, therefore, as on the Continent, the same 
dogged and persistent loyalty to the old festivals 
was the perplexity of the Scots minister as it had 
long been that of the Roman priest. 
The Glasgow Kirk Session, on December 26, 
1583, arraigned five persons before them who were 
147 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





ordered to make public repentance because they kept 
the superstitious day called Yule. The baxters were 
required to give the names of those for whom they 
had baked Yule bread, so that they might be dealt 
with by the Church. Ten years after this, in 1593, 
an Act was again passed by the Glasgow Session 
against the keeping of Yule, and therein it was 
ordained that the keepers of this feast were to be 
de barred from the privileges of the Church, and also 
to be punished by the magistrates. 

Notwithstanding these measures, the people still 
inclined to observe Yule, for, fifty-six years after, in 
1649, the General Assembly appointed a commission 
to make report of the public practices, among others 
“the druidical customs observed at the fires of 
Beltane, Midsummer, Hallowe’en and Ule.” In the 
same year appears the following minute in the session- 
book of the parish of Slains: 


26th Nov. 1649. ‘The said day, the minister and elders 
being convened in session, and after invocation of the name 
of God, intimate that Yule be not kept, but that they yoke 
their oxen and horse, and employ their servants in their 
service that day as well as on other days.’ 


The substitution of superstition for superstition, 
which had proved in the Roman Church a temporary 


1 See Rust’s Druidism Exhumed. 


148 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





advantage and a permanent embarrassment, was not 
merely unnecessary under the Reformers, but treason 
to God. They were men of sterner mould, practising 
what they preached. The bishop whom they drove 
out had “indulged in recreation, thinking a game of 
cards [‘ the deil’s picture-books”] or gold not amiss ; 
they even danced or looked on while others danced!” 
All this was simply Satan to the Puritan movement 
of Melville, which, instead of degenerating in virility 
as is the nature of all things, grew more stern and 
vindictive year by year. 

Compare, then, the standpoints of natural religion 
(which to the Puritan was simply witchcraft in all 
its activities) and this implacable Puritanism, The 
witch, in the minds of the Scots peasantry, as op- 
pressed and ignorant a type as any in Europe, repre- 
sented ancient, indestructible fears and fancies, fairies 
and demons, good luck and bad. She provided coarse 
pleasures and extravagant joys best suited to hard, 
unlettered times. She loved the beauty of the forest 
and the stream; she treasured old, wonderful tales ; 
she could bless as well as curse, and cure as well as 
kill, Where witchcraft flourished unchallenged it was 
undistinguishable from the natural joy and folk-lore 
of the race. Only in its outbreaks of ferocity was it 


typical of historical representation. 
149 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





Against the ethics of the witch the Kirk launched 
its counter-attack. 


All the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amuse- 
ments, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were 
sinful, and were to be rooted out. It was sinful for a 
mother to have sons, and, if she had any, it was sinful to 
be angry about their welfare. It was asin to please your- 
self, or to please others; for by adopting either course 
you were sure to displease God. All pleasures therefore, 
however slight in themselves or however lawful they 
might appear, must be carefully avoided. When mixing 
in society, we should edify the company if the gift of 
edification had been bestowed upon us; but we should 
by no means attempt toamuse them. Cheerfulness, especi- 
ally when it rose to laughter, was to be guarded against, 
andwe should choose for our associates grave and sorrowful 
men who were not likely to indulge in so foolish a practice. 
Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might oc- 
casionally be allowed; still, being a carnal pastime, it was 
a sin to smile on Sunday. 


And again: 


It was, moreover, wrong to take pleasure in beautiful 
scenery, for a pious man had no concern with such matters, 
which were beneath him, and the admiration of which 
should be left to the unconverted. . . . To write poetry, 
for instance, was a grievous offence and worthy of especial 
condemnation. To listen to music was equally wrong... . 
Dancing was so extremely sinful that an edict expressly 


1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. iii, 
150 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 


prohibiting it was enacted by the General Assembly, and 

read in every church in Edinburgh.’ 

To ignore the Kirk was not possible, since escape 
was impracticable, and, spiritual penalties failing, im- 
prisonment, branding, beating, or exposure in an iron 
collar before the parish cooled any feverish notions 
of the sacred right of liberty. 


Ill 

The witch persecutions received their greatest 
impetus from the royal approval of James I and VI. 
Whether that unwholesome and cynical personage 
was genuinely credulous of Satan’s imminence is un- 
known, but that he was fully aware of its political 
significance regarding himself is very probable. He 
expressed delight when, during a trial, it was stated 
that the Devil looked upon the King as his most 
doughty foe, but as the Scots Master of the Revels 
was embodied in the form of Bothwell the compli- 
ment was tempered with very practical perils. In 
1603 the College of Aberdeen ordered every minister, 
with the assistance of his watch-dogs, the elders, to 
make “a subtle and privy inquisition ” for witches, 
and as the whole science of witchcraft was elabo- 
rated for the guidance of those who were conducting 

1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol, it, 


151 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





the examination it remained only to discover the 
witch. 

And instantly the shadow of an intolerable dread 
fell over every parish in the Lowlands. To be sus- 
pected of witchcraft in even its most innocent form 
was to be sooner or later accused, and to be accused 
was almost certainly to suffer death. In Scotland, 
unlike the Continent, the defence of the witch did 
not depend upon lack of evidence in the prosecution, 
or her denial, or any other reasonable count—it 
depended upon her ability to withstand torture or 
her good luck in possessing none of the fatal physical 
insignia. 

In other lands witches frequently confessed will- 
ingly, or confessed under torture, but the court was 
not compelled to wring a confession by force, ala 
every kirk in Scotland hung a box in which names 
of suspected persons could be inserted secretly for 
official investigation. When the minister was in- 
formed of a woman under the shadow of such vile 
gossip he denounced her straightway from the pulpit 
and encouraged evidence against her. From that 
moment the unfortunate creature was doomed. There 
could be no door of escape where it was a matter of 
conscience that a witch must die. The minister was 
all-powerful in his parish. He accused the witch, 
152 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





caused her to be dragged before him as commissioner, 
put her to an examination as thorough and more 
merciless than that of an Inquisitor, and when she 
refused to speak, or denied her guilt, ordered her to 
be tortured. 

The process of compelling confessions was ap- 
proved, and encouraged as the humiliation of the Evil 
One. The tortures used were revolting. Pitcairn 
relates: 


One of the most powerful incentives to confession was 
systematically to deprive the suspected witch of the re- 
freshment of her natural sleep. Iron collars, or witch’s 
bridles, used for such iniquitous purposes are still pre- 
served in various parts of Scotland. These instruments 
were so constructed that by means of a hoop which passed 
over the head a piece of iron having four points or prongs 
was forcibly thrust into the mouth, two of these being 
directed to the tongue and palate, the others pointing 
outward to each cheek. This infernal machine was 
secured by a padlock. At the back of the collar was 
fixed a ring by which to attach the prisoner to a staple 
in the wall of her cell. Thus equipped, and night and 
day waked and watched by some skilful person appointed 
by her inquisitors, the unhappy creature, after a few days 
of such discipline, maddened by the misery of her forlorn 
and helpless state, would be rendered fit for confessing 
anything in order to be rid of the dregs of her wretched 
life. At intervals fresh examinations took place; these 
were repeated from time to time, until her ‘ contumacy,” 
as it was termed, was subdued. ‘The clergy and the 


153 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


Kirk Sessions appear to have been the unwearied instru- 
ments of ‘‘ purging the land of witchcraft, and to them, in 
the first instance, all the complaints and informations were 
made.” + 


The only possible certainty of securing comparative 
safety lay in a close adherence to the Kirk and the 
zealous hunting down of superstition in all its shapes 
and forms. The habit of eavesdropping and spying, 
so characteristic of Puritanism, became a natural safe- 
guard, for if a man was not at his neighbour’s key- 
hole it was probable that his neighbour would be 
at his. Every witch trial was charged with common 
peril. By the use of thumbscrews, the boots, and a 
terrible iron frame in which the human leg was fixed 
and charred were extracted not merely personal con- 
fessions, but name after name of fellow-parishioners, 
who in their turn would be hard put to it to prove 
they had not danced a reel on such and such a night, 
the moon being out and Satan quite evidently abroad. 


W itch-finding now increased rapidly in Scotland. No 
fewer than fourteen special commissions were issued for 
the sole purpose of trying witches for the sederunt of 
November the 7th, 16613; and on the 23rd of January, 
1662, fourteen more were made out. It was the popular 
amusement of the day, and no one or two men then 
living could have turned the tide in favour of these poor 
persecuted creatures. Even Sir George Mackenzie, that 


154 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 


‘‘noble wit of Scotland,” failed to make any reasonable 
impression on the besotted public, though his pleadings 
and writings got him into immense disfavour with the 
religious part of the community, and caused him to be 
ranked as an atheist and Sadducee, and classed with the 
Pilates and Judases of history. Though it had been the 
Bull of Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 which had first stirred 
up the zeal of the godly against witchcraft, and written 
that terrible text, ‘‘ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” 
in still more terrible characters of blood and suffering, 
yet Calvinistic Scotland soon outstripped even the super- 
stitious Papacy in her frantic piety, and poured out a 
sea of innocent blood which will stain her pages with 
an ineffaceable stain for ever and for ever. Yet she was 
nearly a hundred years behind Rome in her zeal, for it 
was not till June, 15632, that she made the subject matter 
for legislation at all, and then the Estates! enacted ‘that 
‘nae person take upon hand to use any manner of witch- 
crafts, sorcery, or necromancy, nor give themselves furth 
to have ony sic craft or knowledge thereof therethrough 
abusing the people’; also, that ‘nae person seek ony 
help, response, or consultation, at ony sic users or 
abusers of witchcrafts under pain of death.’ This is the 
statute under which all the subsequent witch trials took 
place.” But bad as it was under the Presbyterians and 
the Elders, it is true that under the Restoration the witch 
persecutions in Scotland were even more excessive than 
during the reign of the Covenanters, and that the return 
of Charles II brought satisfaction and pleasure to the 
younger women only of his dominions, but nothing save 
torture to the old, the poor, andthe despised. Ray says 


1 Chambers, Domestic Annals. 


155 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





that about a hundred and twenty witches suffered in the 
year 1661, the year after the Restoration had brought joy 
and gladness to all loyal hearts, so that it mattered little 
whether Puritan or Cavalier, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, 
had the upper hand. 


The incessant burning of witches became a part 
of social life and parochial record. No voice was 
raised to denounce the murder of the innocent, many 
of them young and beautiful girls who, tragically 
enough, preferred ‘to die rather than return after trial 
to a home and a village that would never again admit 
them. 


IV 

Such examples of the tragedies of fanaticism expose 
Hagrantly enough what is possible under religious 
tyranny. But they also reveal the extraordinary 
dominance of the Scots Kirk and the submission of 
a dour and courageous people to the greatest spiritual 
authority within modern times. Any investigation 
of persecution must interest itself finally, not in 
the terrors of the hour, but in the progressive or 
retrogressive genius of its objective. 

Generalizations are notoriously unstable, but for 
the sake of an objective and historical symbol the 
witch has presented in this outline the philosophy of 

1 E. L. Linton, Witch Stories. 
156 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





the material as opposed to the idealism of the spiritual. 
The distinction is as old as time and as typical of 
every age as the voice of right and of wrong. It is, 
however, a commonplace, of which the persecution 
of witchcraft is a classic example, that the sense of 
values, particularly of spiritual values, is at the mercy 
of the inherent malobservation of human intelligence. 
In the Middle Ages the science of theology, by 
establishing dogma upon dogma, had formulated a 
static faith without the power of change or the 
breath of eternity. Challenged by the Renaissance, 
and faced by revelations of natural instead of super- 
natural law, it declared a Holy War in this world 
instead of preaching the timeless mystery of God 
in the next. 

In a similar fashion the Kirk of Scotland was des- 
tined, though not so savagely, to find her foundations 
were of sand. She had set up the infallibility of the 
Bible instead of the infallibility of Holy Church, and 
the downfall of Satan was the first sign of her dis- 
solution. The eternal and invisible had been so long 
shackled to the temporal and visible that when one 
stone collapsed the whole structure was threatened. 

Glanire wrote truly enough: “ Atheism is begun in 
Sadducism, and those that dare not bluntly say there 
is no God, content themselves (for a fair step and 

157 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


introduction) to deny there are spirits or witches.” 
In 1768 John Wesley struck the same prophetic note 
in the words: 


It is true likewise that the English in general, and in- 
deed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given 
up all account of witches and apparitions as mere old 
wives’ fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take 
this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against 
this violent compliment which so many that believe the 
Bible pay to those who do not believe it. They well 
know (whether Christians know it or not) that the giving 
up witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible. 


Here, then, was the last taunt of the historic witch. 
Her enemies had destroyed her upon the divine 
authority of a tribal text. To laugh her out of 
court was a kindly enough dismissal—but she did 
not depart alone. For with her went the infallibility 
of the Bible. If witchcraft was but a delusion and 
Satan a myth, as the sceptics of the new learning 
hastened to make known, then the very foundations 
of theology were split in twain, and the elements of 
witchcraft—the goodly things of this world—had 
been in exile not because of a dream, but because 
of a nightmare. It is not difficult to understand how 
swiftly the tide turned back to shores hardly touched 
for a thousand years—how a new dawn seemed to 
show in the East, and the kingdom of heaven to have 
158 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 


come down to earth. All over the world the discip- 
line of the Church was challenged except within the 
ranks of her confirmed adherents. She no longer con- 
trolled the State, nor could she prosecute the pioneers 
of learning. With the advance of education and the 
inestimable influence of raw knowledge flung hap- 
hazard into the world the eighteenth century became 
the centre of a profound reaction against the super- 
- natural in all its forms. The French Revolution, that 
final challenge to oppression after centuries of unrest, 
set the whole world of unlettered men in a ferment. 
They burst their bonds, and with their proud equality, 
fraternity, and liberty shackled themselves anew in 
the industrial slavery of the nineteenth century. 

In this new warfare between the spiritual and the 
material Scotland stood, in her rigid condemnation of 
the things of this world, as the last antagonist of the 
witch. The derision of Montaigne had set all Europe 
gloating over the discomfiture of Rome. In England 
—ever the land of the middle course—there was no 
sense of triumph, but only of immense relief. In 
Scotland the Kirk neither recanted nor denied. The 
historical witch might pass, but the perils of the flesh 
remained. Satan was never in retreat; he only mani- 
fested himself through more subtle channels. He 
had passed from the primeval forest into the seats of 

159 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





learning, there to be enshrined as the liberator of 
the soul of progress and the spirit of science. But 
the passion for the spiritual rather than the material 
moulded Scottish character in the zenith of its un- 
equalled intellectual and commercial progress, and 
therefore cannot be lightly dismissed or ridiculed. 
In the days of the witch burnings the severity of 
the Kirk brought physical terror enough, but it also 
infected a whole nation with a sense of the brevity 
of life and with the urgency of morality in national 
conduct. It gave strength, vision, sincerity, where 
there had been little enough of these before. It 
also set in the heart of an inarticulate people a 
kind of poetic passion and idealism, so that it can be 
said without exaggeration that one of the virtues of 
spiritual discipline was the profound consciousness 
of spiritual freedom. 


Vv 

In the Scotland of the nineteenth century there 
is the greatest modern instance of the will to live 
in accordance with a definite understanding of the 
spiritual in its relationship to the world. There 
was in her national life, however grotesque, how- 
ever mistaken, a cohesive and constructive ethical 
policy. To ridicule the extraneous elements of that 
160 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 








policy is simple enough. But the tree is judged by 
its fruit. Behind the rigid standards, the heart- 
breaking desert of austerities, there dwelt the vision 
of the spiritual and the faith that endures to the end. 
What were the means by which that remarkable fibre 
was woyen into the texture of a people? 

The Scots Kirk elevated spiritual discipline to a 
pinnacle of national idealism. It preached God as 
the righteous judge of all the world, before Whom 
the inmost hearts of men would be revealed. This 
sense of the infinite nearness of eternity hardened 
the national conscience against every form of indul- 
gence and aimless pleasure. But it did not extin- 
guish happiness. Rather it grafted it upon the 
rugged tree of independence and self-government. 
Never before did a nation respond with such readiness 
to a faith so apparently stripped of beauty and senti- 
ment. It was like a religion of granite, and on the 
surface it bred a race after its own grim heart. But 
under the surface it gave to Scots domestic life a 
sweetness and a loyalty and a reality that are passing 
and are gone. 

It is therefore of significance to examine not so 
much the crude pains and penalties which Buckle 
has so zealously striven to contend cowed the whole 
spirit of progress until the last generation, but rather 

L 101 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


the contribution such laws of conduct have made to 
the history of progress. 

It can be said that in Scotland as in no other 
country religion and education for three hundred 
years became national ideals. In the Middle Ages 
the authority of Holy Church formed and governed 
the very life and inspiration of an entire continent, but 
its supremacy was largely dependent upon the sup- 
pression of intellectual inquiry. In Scotland the thirst 
for knowledge and a high sense of values was im- 
planted and fostered as a divine duty. Honourable 
success on earth was preached as an illustration of 
that great and beautiful exordium, “ Well done, good 
and faithful servant,” but it was not the reward so 
much as the justification of endeavour. 

The Kirk stood for democracy in an age when 
king, bishops, and nobles were united against the 
people. It is almost a solitary instance of organized 
Christianity standing for the humble and obscure. 
However obstinate or irrational the Covenanters may 
have been, they held life more cheaply than acqui- 
escence, and the association of the parish minister 
with the cause of the oppressed was a worthy 
enough tribute to his future place in Scots life and 
character. Nor was the Kirk retrogressive in spirit. 


In the nineteenth century the manse became a 
162 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





synonym for high culture, learning, and faith. At 
the very heart of Scotland’s national characteristics 
it was permanently stationed, and an examination of 
its ideals presents the homely interior of Scottish 
life. 

From the manse came religious observance, educa- 
tion, and a type of simplicity which was as lofty as 
it was kindly. It was, as nowhere else, the central 
point or pivot of the parish. 


Among all the houses in a Scottish parish the homeliest 
and kindliest is the manse, for to its door some time in 
the year comes every inhabitant, from the laird to the 
cottar woman. Within the familiar and old-fashioned 
study, where the minister’s chair and writing-table could 
not be changed without discomposing the parish, and 
where there are fixed degrees of station, so that the laird 
has his chair, and the servant lass hers, the minister 
receives and does his best for all the folk committed to 
his charge. Here he consults with the factor about 
some improvement in the arrangements of the little 
commonwealth; he takes counsel with a farmer about 
his new lease and promises to say a good word to his 
lordship; he confirms the secret resolution of some 
innocent gifted lad to study for the holy ministry; he 
hears the shamefaced confession of some lassie whom 
love has led astray; he gives good advice to a son 
leaving the glen for the distant world; he comforts 
the mother who has received bad news from abroad. 
Generations have come in their day to this room, and 


163 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








en, 


generations still unborn will come in their joys and 
sorrows, with their trials, while the manse stands and 
human life runs its old course.! 


Within this little world minister and school- 
teacher worked together to set the feet of the 
young generation on the paths of knowledge. Edu- 
cation hardly sought and hardly won was the pride 
of the castle and the croft. It became the greatest 
thing in life. The passion for learning permeated 
the whole nation from professor to ploughman, and 
was carried throughout the English-speaking world. 
It sent the Scots missionary to darkest Africa, the 
Scots pioneer to the mountains of Canada, and the 
Scots engineer to open out the highways of the world. 
It gave to our colonies that basis of endurance and 
self-dependence that is the real value and moral 
purpose of an empire. 

In a recent book, Sons of the Manse, the Rey. 
A. W. Fergusson records two interesting quotations 
in this connexion. Biot, the great French physicist, 
remarks: 


The results of education are such that they strike with 
astonishment those who observe them for the first time. 
The Scots, poor, and inhabiting a country by no means 
fertile, have risen by their education and civilization to 


+ Tan Maclaren, Kate Carnegie (Hodder and Stoughton), 
164. 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 





the level of, and, if the lower orders are considered, 
have surpassed, a nation which is regarded as one of the 
most enlightened on the face of the earth. Wherever 
a Scotsman goes, the education he has received in the 
parish schools gives his mind a peculiar power of obser- 
vation, and enables him to extend his view far beyond 
the range of objects which occupy the attention of persons 
of the same social status who have not been so educated. 


And the other is the better-known statement of 
Macaulay : 

The old parochial school was the foundation of Scot- 
land’s proudest distinction, and proved the great source 
of her prosperity ; and it is owing not indeed solely but 
principally to it that in spite of her climate her people 
have made such progress in agriculture, in manufacture, 
in commerce, in letters, in science, in all that constitutes 
civilization, as the old world has never seen equalled, and 
as the new world has scarcely seen surpassed. 


It was the spirit of the parish school that set so 
high a price on education, but behind that national 
austerity, that dour determination, which alike in 
Presbyterian regiments and the mission field has 
become an accepted characteristic of the North, 
there burned a high sense of independence and 
religion learned in the parish kirk. It has been 
emphasized how near the minister lived to the lives 
of his flock. A poor man himself, yet he was de- 
pendent on none, and in the troubles and emotions 

165 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





of his flock he stood for the defenceless against 
the rapacity of chieftain and landowner. The per- 
secutions of landowners and the harsh eviction of 
thousands of helpless people during the nineteenth 
century were borne with unexampled patience and 
heroism as the will of Almighty God. In those 
searching times the ministers exercised an influence 
at once courageous and faithful, and in many cases 
went into exile with their people. However opinions 
may differ regarding the rights or wrongs of the 
Disruption of 1843, the spectacle of several hundred 
men, many of them old and penniless, risking absolute 
wreckage for conscience’ sake produced a profound 
impression upon a nation pledged to independence. 
It set up in a century already handed over to indus- 
trialism a memorial of sacrifice and spiritual freedom. 

That the source of this national type should be 
the manse is natural enough, since from the manse 
has come the largest proportion of eminent men in 
Scotland The manse resembled the English vicarage 
in its simplicity of life, its large families, and its 
spirit of idealism. Simplicity of life gave to its 
children bodily health and happiness and patience ; 
its family circle and interests were too large for 


1 For statistics see Sons of the Manse, by the Rev. A. W. Fergusson, 
B.D. (Gardner), 


166 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 


introspection or imaginary grievances; and its sense 
of the spiritual formed an imperishable background 
of immortality. 

But the Scots manse differed enormously from the 
English vicarage in its racial influence. It was in- 
comparably more the centre of national consciousness. 
It became the embodiment of Scotland wherever her 
children wandered. It inspired from early childhood 
that loyalty which is the meaning of patriotism. 

If, then, the peculiar genius of the Scots people, 
which reached its height in the nineteenth century, 
produced a national type at once progressive and re- 
ligious, the sources from which those qualities sprang 
have an interest more than reminiscent. 

Progress is not simply confined to education, nor 
even to discipline, unless discipline is accepted as 
the way of life. What John Henry Newman wrote 
eighty years ago is true enough to-day: 


If virtue be a mastery over the mind, if its end be 
action, if its perfection be universal order, harmony and 
peace .. . the problem of statesmen of this age is how 
to educate the masses; and literature and science cannot 
give the solution, Faith, not knowledge or argument, 
is our principle of action. . . . Intrinsically excellent and 
noble as are scientific pursuits and worthy of a place in a 
liberal education, and fruitful in temporal gifts to the com- 
munity, still they are not, and cannot be, the instruments 


167 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





of an ethical training. The apprehension of the un- 
seen is the only known principle of subduing moral evil, 
educating the multitude, and organising society. And 
whereas man is born for action, action flows not from 
inferences, but from impressions—not from reasonings, 
but from faith. 


If it is reasonable to explain the national charac- 
teristics of the nineteenth century in Scotland as a 
triumph of spiritual discipline and to associate with 
that rule of conduct extraordinary progress in com- 
merce and life, is it not within the boundaries of this 
examination of such moral values to consider in con- 
clusion the attitude of modern thought toward the 
spiritual ? 


168 


CHAPTER VII 
THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 


I 

T has been suggested in an earlier chapter that 

in the long conflict between authoritative Chris- 

tianity and the material world the Church evolved 
a science of theology which, being defective in its 
spiritual values, was finally challenged upon material 
issues and discountenanced. To take a familiar in- 
stance, when the Kirk of Scotland was embarrassed 
by the higher critic with his pointed exposures of 
Scriptural fallibility an immediate impression was given 
that God had perished in the ruins. The corner- 
stone of authority appeared to have broken in twain. 
The consequences were soon visible in every section 
of society. Not only Presbyterianism, but education 
as well, lost its early quality of renunciation, so that 
in Scotland to-day mental stamina and the ideal of 
pure knowledge have lost their old meaning. The 
same depreciation of values higher than commercial 
prestige are a commonplace of modern civilization. 


These results are more and more engaging the serious 
169 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








examination of social historians. And yet the causes of 
decay in contemporary standards are less easy to define 
than those, for example, in Scotland. ‘There is not 
so much observable chaos as a vacuum in civilization 
created by the disappearance of certain intense and 
volcanic psychological forces. These may have been 
inspired by religion, patriotism, or some other human 
emotionalism. It is their disappearance, not their 
nature, that is significant. In their place other 
forces, not unfamiliar, but never hitherto supreme, 
are on trial, and in their turn will receive the praise 
or condemnation of history. 

In the course of this inadequate outline there has 
been small hope of any achievement beyond the sug- 
gestion of some lines of inquiry. ‘The presence of 
the witch in the social structure has symbolized the 
natural proclivity of all humanity to degenerate from 
ethical progress into the more easy state of material 
stasis. On the other side the Church has evidenced, 
however crudely and however mistakenly, the ideal 
of spiritual energy. 

It has been emphasized that out of witchcraft came 
science, and it is a dream of mechanical conquest that 
has principally misled and deluded modern civilization. 


1 «No storm is so insidious as a perfect calm, and no enemy so 
dangerous as the absence of all enemies” (St Ignatius). 


170 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





Secondly, the sense of the world as a material entity 
responding to material laws removed the mystery of 
natural phenomena. At the same time it must be 
admitted that after long centuries of travail the un- 
folding of the revelation of natural law, however im- 
pressive its miracles, affected in no degree the spiritual 
and emotional in either literature or life. The re- 
action, so pathetic and disturbing, to-day toward the 
more superstitious hinterland of human beliefs is due 
to the supreme disillusionment that the wonders of 
scientific research have brought the ordinary man. 
What he expected who can say? What he has re- 
ceived is a stone instead of bread. The symptoms 
of this reaction are not explained away by war, 
or unsettled conditions, or advanced knowledge, for 
all these things have existed in one way or another 
before. They can only indicate a realization of 
failure. In the most cursory examination of Western 
civilization to-day the noticeable factor is the spirit 
of energy combined with the spirit of unrest. They 
are the fruit not of the grey delusion that out of 
bloodshed emerges content, but of that more ancient 
knowledge that man cannot live by bread alone. Our 
ancestors did not travel in automobiles, but their vision 
of life was steadier than ours. It was also loftier, 
The genius of the age is mediocrity. As José 


171 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


Enrique Rodo remarks in his moving criticism of 
modern American standards of life: 


The clash between the democratic rule and the higher 
life becomes a fatal reality when that rule imparts the 
disregard of even legitimate superiorities and the substi- 
tution of mechanical government for a faith in heroism 
(in Carlyle’s sense). All in civilization that is more than 
material excellence, economic prosperity, is a height that 
will be levelled when moral authority is given to the 
average mind. ‘Though there be no longer external 
invading hordes to hurl themselves upon the beacon 
lights of civilization with a might now devastating and 
now regenerating, the high culture of to-day should 
guard itself against the soft and gradual dissolvent work 
of those other crowds, pacific, even educated—the un- 
escapable multitudes of the vulgar, whose Attila might 
well be personified in “Mr Homais,” whose heroism is 
shrewdness, ordered by an instinctive repugnance for 
what is great; whose device is the leveller. Immovable 
indifference and quantitative superiority are its attributes, 
the usual result of its labours; yet is it not entirely 
incapable of rising to epic heights, usually of anger, giv- 
ing free reins to its antipathies. Charles Morice called 
it «those phalanxes of ferocious Prudhommes who have 
for their device Mediocrity, and march together in their 
hatred of all that is extraordinary.” Elevated to power, 
these Prudhommes will make of their triumphant will an 
organized hunting-party against all that shows aptitude 
or daring wing to fly high. Its social formula will be 
a democracy which leads to the consecration of Pope 
Anyone, the coronation of King Average. They will 
hate merit as a rebellion. In their dominion all noble 


172 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





superiority will be like a marble statue placed in a miry 
road to be spattered by the mud of any passing waggon. 
They will call the dogmatism of common sense, wisdom ; 
mean aridness of heart, gravity ; adaptation to the mediocre, 
sound judgment; and bad taste, manly indifference to 
trifles. Their notion of justice will lead them either to 
substitute in history the immortality of great men by the 
common forgetfulness of all, or to preserve it with the 
equal memory of a Mithridates who knew the names of all 
his soldiers. Its manner of republicanism will resemble 
that of Fox, who used to submit his projects to the criterion 
of that member who seemed to him the most perfect type 
of the country gentleman, judging by the limitation of his 
faculties and the rudeness of his gestures. 


What were the primary causes of this crude and 
blatant materialism, which more than any orgy of 
the witch are bringing their to-morrow of sorrow 
and misery? They arose very largely through the 
diminishing sense of values and the consequent 
progress of the gospel of wealth. It is important 
to appreciate the meaning of true and false values 
according to Ruskin and not John Stuart Mill. A 
true sense of values makes for that art of life that 
is independent of material burdens. As Mr F. J. 
Stimson recently wrote: 
Value may be defined as that which gives strength to 
life and elevation to the soul. Beauty does this; and 


purity of thought ; and high knowledge, both of past and 
+ Ariel, translated by F. J, Stimson (Houghton Mifflin Co.) 


ya! 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


present ; and these are works of art and of teaching, not 
of science. And virtue, which is the word value as 
applied to the spirit, is born of thought and bred to 
character. 





It is toward such a conception of life that all re- 
ligion and philosophy has struggled. ‘The reliance 
of modern Western civilization upon mechanical 
methods for the expression of its energy is not 
merely deceptive in its obvious activity, but damaging 
in its evidences of progress judged by achievement. 
During the nineteenth century, in that prolonged 
Victorian era which is ceasing to seem so amusing, 
youth aspired to some idealism of life beyond its 
dreams of conquest. ‘To-day there are handbooks 
with the narrow path to wealth preached with the 
urgency of a Savonarola, and the biographies of 
unheroic men of millions are written with a kind of 
passionate fervour and like a new revelation of the 
Almighty The progress of the witch—to recur to 
the medieval symbol of worldliness—has never so 
speedily advanced as in our time, in the Western 
adoration of worldly success allied with the gospel 
of comfort. To the most casual observer of our 
ethical values the thirst to “get something out of 


1 «The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have 
stout hearts and sharp swords,”—Lord Birkenhead’s Rectorial address 
to the students of Glasgow University, November 7, 1923. 


174 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





life,’ to move from sensation to sensation, lends to 
our actions a kind of tremendous insignificance which, 
if it possesses more ultimate importance than the ro- 
tation of a squirrel in a cage, has, one cannot deny, 
hardly more actual reality. Such a civilization, with 
its scurried educational system, its empty idealism of 
human freedom and human welfare, its inability to 
concentrate steadily or feel consistently, confronted 
the Church with a challenge at once arrogant and 
complacent. It had summed up the spiritual as a 
wholesale shop might sum up the struggling trades- 
man, and with the greatest effrontery ordered the 
eternal mysteries into line. In other words, the 
gospel of comfort had no use for spiritual discipline 
of the Scots Kirk type. If life was to be worth 
living it must be easy-going. Like the theatre or 
the cinema or the latest fiction, the Church must 
preach according to the needs of the age. And the 
chief need of the age, apart from the commercial 
justification of life, was the sense of security both 
here and hereafter. There must be no mental 
acceleration beyond the affairs—those real affairs— 
of commerce. If the Church was to persist it must 
conform to new standards of existence, As the 
doctor must soften any notion of gravity in disease 
and so smooth it over that it is hardly there at all 

175 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


the Church must be businesslike in its department. 
It must remember that the worshipper in the pew 
knows as much as the vicar in the pulpit, and that 
the tired business man cannot sit or stand or listen 
or achieve on the seventh day any of the normal 
functions of physical or mental acceleration. 

One must allow that the Church has more than 
met “the needs of the age.” It speedily hurried 
into obscurity the Victorian God of Judgment, stern 
but righteous, and set up in His stead a kind of unc- 
tuous bachelor uncle ever ready with expressions of 
congratulation and pardon. The historic priest who 
had struggled with the old degeneration of mankind 
now blossomed into the contemporary Christian rejoic- 








ing in bazaars and unembarrassed by any intellectual 
or traditional convictions. 

In this fashion the twentieth century dawned with 
an indescribable effulgence. The whole horizon of 
life being thus drawn down to the limits of the world, 
the sense even of the mystery and wonder of the 
universe faded more and more from contemporary 
thought, or found compensation and satisfaction in 
the marvels of purely mechanical and scientific achieve- 
ments. Such phases are symptoms of all civilizations 
in twilight, but the faculty for conducting national 
affairs without any particular ethical or spiritual con- 
176 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





victions is an original contribution to the history of 
mankind. Not that the idea of the spiritual has 
vanished, Rather has it materialized and become 
shop-soiled. No longer feared, it provides in a nervy 
age a sense of delicious intimacy. Dragged down 
to earth, its manifestations are now the topic of tea- 
tables and the subject of newspaper articles. After 
all the long years of searching and denial, after all 
the ecstasies of the mystic and the agonies of the 
martyr, the spiritual is proclaimed the most accessible 
and amenable of the human attributes. 

To examine evidences of this modern attitude 
toward the things that are of heaven is not simply 
to outline certain familiar examples of contemporary 
thought, but to let such examples serve as their own 
commentary upon the sense of values that is satisfied 
with their conclusions. 

One of the most arresting features in the works 
of writers upon “ metapsychics” (to use the term of 
Professor Richet) is the rather injured attitude that 
a “new” science should be combated by malicious 
and material enemies. In what sense spiritualism 
(as apart from a natural interpretation of the sub- 
conscious) can be regarded either as “new” or a 
‘science’? is perplexing. So long as the super- 
natural explanation of admittedly baffling phenomena 

M 177 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


is maintained it is older than all the sciences, and will 
continue to meet with opposition until it can supply 
the evidences of proof required by all hypotheses 
and also until it ceases to lower the plane of spiritual 
values. Any examination of the assumptions of its 
several lines of investigation produces no evidence 
that is either beyond the possibility of a natural 
interpretation or that, if it is incomprehensible, 
warrants any spiritual explanation. In what sense 
is it “new” or “scientific”? It is new only in the 
sense that it is represented by a body of persons 
devoted to psychical research. In what sense has 
knowledge of the psychic advanced? Apart from 
documentary records, it has if anything advanced 
only from the supernatural to the natural, and usually 
from the superstitious to the scientific. 

Unless modern research, undertaken as it is by 
men of trained observation and integrity, can afford 
evidence that proves the co-operation of an ex- 
traneous personality in relation to the human mind the 
spiritualistic explanation must perish, and is perishing. 
How much of the ancient lore of the witch is now 
declared as belonging to the subconscious is sufficient 
indication of the way the tide is running, since 
practically all the evidence recently sustained as 
supernatural is now relegated to the subconscious, 
178 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





What remains must for a while meet the final test of 
all. That test will never be substantiated by cross- 
correspondence, or messages in envelopes, or photo- 
graphs of ghosts. If the spiritual exists beyond the 
yearning of the soul of man it is severed from the 
material not merely by evidence, but by reason. 
To assume that the spiritual is upon the same natural 
and ethical plane as the material is to degrade the 
most sublime and most passionate force in human 
history. 


IT 

In a candid examination of the psychic it is not 
an essential that one should have attended séances, 
since the records of séances are at anyone’s disposal. 
What is essential is that the evidence should either 
provide irrefutable proof of extraneous influence or 
that, lacking such proof, the general atmosphere of 
the negotiations should coincide with a reasonable 
belief in the ethical nobility of the spiritual plane. 
Without either of these two attributes psychical in- 
vestigation may have (and assuredly has) immense 
scientific discoveries to reveal in the subconscious 
processes of the human mind, but it must cease to 
claim any direct correspondence with the spiritual 


ie, 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








world. It may seem a dogmatic test, but after so 
many thousands of years of persistent depreciation 
of spiritual values it possesses at least the support 
of time and of eternity. The great moral contribu- 
tion of the scientific spirit has been the passion for 
pure knowledge. What is inaccurate must be sacri- 
ficed. With this sense of the scientific attitude 
toward all evidence it has been a matter of contro- 
versy that the spiritualist refuses to admit the 
credentials of men trained, to put it no higher, 
in the phenomena of the human mind and body. 
Threatened by such an investigation the spiritualist 
pleads that the supernatural is a special domain like 
no other department of knowledge, or that a medium 
is averse to strangers, or that the spirit of incredulity 
hurts the feelings of the attendant immortals from 
‘the ather:sidt.7: 

Before the more specialized departments of 
psychical phenomena are noticed it should be ob- 
served that there are within the experience of the 
majority of people episodes that are inexplicable 
except upon the grounds of supernatural agency. 
In other words, we are all more or less partisans 
of the plaintiff. How much is our evidence worth? 
In the vast majority of cases such incidents gain value 
by hearsay. There is no more elusive person than 
180 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





the man your uncle met. Like stories of haunted 
houses, first-hand evidence is difficult to find, and in 
practically all instances unreliable upon examination, 
It is also extraordinarily conventional. 

The inherent instinct toward the dramatic in life is 
also a persistent danger, and the craze for sensation 
has no convincing representation of sincerity. At 
the same time, it is true that in all ages the presence 
of cryptesthesia, or “a hidden sensibility,” has pro- 
duced an accumulation of similar phenomena sufficient 
to indicate secret forces of the subconscious respect- 
ing things unknown and visions of people, alive or 
dying, who are at a distance. But the origin of such 
phenomena must be emphasized. Premonitions have 
never produced any evidence of knowledge which 1s 
not experienced by telepathic conditions, however 
mysterious these may be. ‘The evidence is there- 
fore all upon the natural, not the supernatural, 
plane. 

Beyond attested cases of telepathic correspondence 
(both by arrangement and not by arrangement), the 
case for the more sensational by-paths of the psychic 
is more for fiction than for serious attention, and must 
be left at that. When a lady states that her house 
contains “an elemental” she is following her instinct 


for social prestige, and when a ghost is seen it is 
181 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





lee. the perquisite of a particular type of imagina- 
tive mind, It is also a weakness in all human nature 
to meet acceptable knowledge more than half-way. 
The subconscious removes intellectual doubts as our 
modern physicians say it removes physical disabilities. 
An example of profound credulity in an eminent man 
of proved intellectual acumen is provided by a cer- 
tain record of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Let it be 
allowed that no man can prove the origin of the in- 
formation he quotes. Is the spiritualistic hypothesis 
then established? Most certainly not. It must 
present some sense of value or reality and some 
adequate reason for the miraculous inter-relationship 
between material and spiritual. And there is appar- 
ently some purpose in a close scrutiny of the inci- 
cident, because it was recorded by an eminent 
spiritualist, has been since quoted by Professor 
Richet, and only last year was again emphasized 
in a speech by Sir Arthur. It is fair therefore 
to approach it as a notable instance. And yet 
it baflles and eludes with its inconsequence and 
irrelevance. It produces once more that sense of 
bewilderment and uneasiness lest by some tragic 
declension the spiritual world is really surging with 
aimless spirits who, knowing all, have lost the gift 


* Authors’ Club, November rg, 1923. 
182 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





of coherence or are like frail mortals on the wrong 
exchange. 


Upon April 4th, 1917, I awoke with a feeling that 
some communication had been made to me of which I 
had only carried back one word, which was ringing in 
my head. That word was ‘“Piave.” To the best of 
my belief I had never heard that word before. As it 
sounded like the name of a place I looked up the index 
of my atlas . . . a river in Italy some forty miles behind 
the front lines, which at that time was victoriously 
advancing. ... I could not think how any military 
event of consequence could arise there, but none the 
less I was so impressed that I drew up a statement that 
some such event would occur there and had it signed 
by my secretary and witnessed by my wife, with the date 
April 4th attached. 


Now the arid facts of this momentous affair are 
these: Considerably before the Italian forces were 
operating on the Piave Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
dreamed that he heard the name. The months 
passed, and the Piave became a commonplace. Here, 
therefore, was a message from a spiritual friend. 
But what an amazingly fruitless one! Sir Arthur 
had, one gathers, no personal tie in Italy, and there 
were infinitely greater crises in the war. The voice, 
having pronounced this single name, vanished, never 
to return. It had won its great opportunity of con- 
verting the world, and it lamentably failed. One 

182 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


lingers over the appalling futility of such a spiritual 
agency. If the movement on the Piave was known 
among the stars so long before, then the catastrophe 
of the Dardanelles was no secret, the Tsar was 
doomed, the fate of the Lusitania was ordained, and 
the shadow of death had already fallen over the 
Hampshire. But it is not to avert such calamities 
that the voices speak, but, like the oracles of old, 
to utter mystic and pliant words which will never 
either afford a fruitful interpretation or suffer a 
deserved rebuff. 

The secondary type of evidence met half-way is 
the familiar assemblage of data invariably associated 
with doctors or deans or judges, and thus given an 
almost immaculate and incontrovertible stamp of 
truth. The following 1s typical: 


The writers of an article on ‘‘ Visible Apparitions” in 
the Nineteenth Century of July, 1884, who are secretaries 
of the ghost-seeking society, relate a case of the kind 
communicated to them by Sir Edmund Hornby, late Chief 
Judge of the Supreme Consular Court of China and Japan, 
who describes himself as a lawyer by education, family, 
and tradition, wanting in imagination and no believer in 
miracles. It was his habit to allow reporters to come to 
his house in the evening to get his written judgments for 
the next day’s paper. On this occasion he had written 
out his judgment and left it with the butler for the re- 
porter, who was expected to call for it. Having gone to 


184 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 








bed, and to sleep, he was awakened soon by a tap at the 
door, which, when he took no notice, was repeated. In 
reply to his call, ‘‘ Come in,” the reporter solemnly entered 
and asked for the judgment. Thereupon ensued a dia- 
logue between Sir E. Hornby—who referred him again 
and again to the butler, protesting against the unwarrant- 
able intrusion—and the reporter, who persisted in his 
earnest requests for the judgment. Impressed at last by 
his solemn earnestness, and fearful of awakening his wife 
(who had slept soundly during all the energetic and ani- 
mated dialogue), Sir Edmund gave him the gist of the 
judgment, which he appeared to take down in shorthand, 
after which he apologized for his intrusion and withdrew. 
It was then just half-past one. When Lady Hornby awoke, 
as she did immediately, the whole incident was related 
to her. 

Next day, when Sir Edmund entered the Court, the 
usher announced to him the sudden death of the re- 
porter, some time between one and half-past one. The 
cause of death, as ascertained by a formal inquest, was 
heart-disease. The poor man had not left his house the 
night before. 

Here then is a precise and circumstantial story related 
by a person of eminence and ability, accustomed to weigh 
evidence, and confirmed (for the writers say so) by his 
wife. Naturally it attracted much attention, and much 
jubilant attention from those who were specially interested 
in ghosts and apparitions. The Spectator saw in it, I be- 
lieve, incontestable proof of the reality of the spiritual 
world. Amongst others it attracted the attention of Mr 
Balfour, the editor of the North China Herald, who was 
well acquainted with Sir Edmund and the reporter alluded 
to. Inaletter to the Nineteenth Century (November, 1884) 


185 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


this gentleman asks the editor to compare the story with 
the following remarks : 

“‘1, Sir Edmund says Lady Hornby was with him at 
the time, and subsequently awoke. I reply that no such 
person was in existence. Sir Edmund’s second wife had 
died two years previously, and he did not marry again till 
three months after the event he relates. 

“2, Sir Edmund mentions an inquest on the body. Il 
reply, on the authority of the coroner, that no inquest was 
ever held. 

«<2, Sir Edmund’s story turns upon the judgment of 
a certain case, which was to be delivered next day, the 
2oth January, 1875. There is no record of any such 
judgment in the Supreme Court and Consular Gazette, of 
which I am now editor. 

“4, Sir Edmund says that the editor died at one in the 
morning. This is wholly inaccurate; he died between 
eight and nine a.M., after a good night’s rest.” 

The editor of the Nineteenth Century, having submitted 
Mr Balfour’s letter to Sir E. Hornby, subjoins that gentle- 
man’s rejoinder, in which, after accusing Mr Balfour of 
want of good-feeling and taste in not having written to 
him privately instead of amusing the public at his expense, 
he practically, though ungraciously, admits the whole case 
against him.? 


Beyond the range of this perfectly vague and more 
or less recreational proclivity there is the genuine 
psychic investigator, who is as anxious to sift the 
grain from the chaff as any other research-worker, 
but in whom the intense spirit of hope has until 


1 Henry Maudsley, M.D., Natural Causes. 
186 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





recently obscured the philosophical touchstone of 
spiritual values. The serious student of the psychic, 
in searching for a natural explanation instead of a 
supernatural, is simply following the long course of 
knowledge. Long since all nature was supernatural. 
To-day the province of the witch narrows and 
narrows. Even what is still mysterious is not there- 
fore spiritual. It is possible to provide an excellent 
example of the handling of the inexplainable as 
the material awaiting explanation. I refer to the 
commercial use of the divining-rod. It is no longer 
disputed that certain individuals can discover hidden 
springs of water by the use of a hazel twig. It is 
further known that this instinct has proved the 
verdict of geologists utterly at sea. And yet could 
anything be more incredible except upon a super- 
natural hypothesis? Nor can it be said that any 
perfectly satisfactory explanation is there to support 
the materialist. But it is beyond even the capacity 
of the determined spiritualist to associate the common- 
place province of estimates and contracts with ghostly 
conveyance! The divining-rod therefore is an inter- 
esting example of natural law presented in a form so 

complex as to elude a scientific formula. 
Otherwise the tendency from the supernatural 
hypothesis to the natural is strengthened year by 
187 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








year, and in a very brief survey of several of the 
more prominent activities of the spiritualist it 1s an 
arduous task to perceive either the shadow of the 
spiritual or the absence of the material. 

(a2) Table-turning (modern name ‘telekinesis ”) 
was practised in the days of Tertullian, when people 
were as desirous. of information in advance as any 
Wall Street speculator, and also greatly fascinated 
by the idea of extraneous and possibly portentous 
spiritual encounters. That the messages afforded 
by such séances then and now have never produced 
any attested sequence of facts unknown or unsus- 
pected to contemporary thought or circumstances is 
one of those arid truths that stand for sane judgment. 
The material will very probably produce the material. 
But what of the physically impossible? What of © 
levitation? It is stated that the powers of raising 
the human body (if true) can be produced only by 
extraneous influence. ‘The name of Hume is quoted, 
but unhappily Hume was not photographed, and as 
Sir William Barrett scouts his pretensions on the 
hypothesis of hypnotism let smaller sceptics follow 
suit. Levitation has been recorded all through the 
ages, and if it is a mystery of the magnetic forces of 
the subconscious must remain for the moment in the 
province of speculation. But the argument for the 
188 | 





THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 


spiritual operating through the material is utterly dis- 
counted upon the assumption that to the supernatural 
muscular limitations do not present an insuperable 
problem. In other words, only a very beggarly idea 
of the supernatural would restrict its miracles to the 
level of the power of a man of normal vigour. 

As Professor Richet most excellently points out: 


These movements are produced through a human being 
and do not exceed the limits of average human muscular 
power. They are produced easily when the object is 
light, with more difficulty when it is heavy, and are not 
produced at all when it is very heavy. To say that the 
force that displaces objects is limited, and approximates 
to human muscular power, advances the enquiry some- 
what, for if a transcendental force were essentially different 
in its nature from known mechanical forces there would 
seem no reason that a weight of a ton should not be raised 
as easily as a weight of an ounce." 


(b) Ectoplasm, There is probably no department 
of psychical phenomena that attracts so much curiosity 
as the materialization of viscous semblances emanat- 
ing from the human form. It is claimed that such 
emanations assume the appearance of other persons 
utterly unlike the medium. Until such a claim is 
demonstrated for a larger and less credulous circle 
of inquirers it cannot be accepted. But, once more, 

1 Thirty Years of Psychical Research, 
189 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


what purpose, spiritual or scientific, does the recorded 
evidence suggest? Is the phenomena “new” and 
therefore worthy of hope, or ancient and full of 
delusion? 

Professor Richet refers to ectoplasm as though it 
were a modern and startling revelation of the un- 
seen. It is nothing of the kind. It has existed in 
the history of the psychic without either development 
or significance ever since the origins of witchcraft. 

In this connexion Sir Squire Sprigge has remarked, 
in his concise and deliberate way: 


Baron von Schrenck Notzing’s work is an unfortunate 
one to be brought forward as a record of scientific experi- 
ence because of the close way in which his description of 
materialisation phenomena follows the description given 
by well-known mystics. Cornelius Agrippa, originator 
of much semi-scientific disquisition, in his De Principis 
Rerum Naturalium mentioned the bitter fight which has 
gone on from the beginnings of history among philosophers 
concerning the matter which should be held as the origin 
of all things, and in that chapter, as well as throughout 
the treatise De Vanitate Omnium Scientiarum et Artium, 
betrays how intimately scientific research has been mixed 
up from the beginning of time with magic, this being par- 
ticularly the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, 
when the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir 
of life engaged so much attention. ‘Thomas Vaughan, the 
author of Aula Lucis and eight or nine other treatises 
inculcating various mystical doctrines, acknowledges his 

190 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 











indebtedness to Agrippa, and in one of his essays postu- 
lates a kind of primordial stuff whose elements are com- 
pounded by God into ‘‘a sperm, viscous and slimy,” and 
throughout his writing speaks of something ‘not water 
otherwise than to the sight, but a coagulable fat humidity ” 
on the ‘‘ seminal viscosity of which vegetables feed.” In 
another place he speaks of ‘‘a subtle moisture but glutin- 
ous”; acertain ‘thick, permanent, saltish water that is 
dry and wets not the hands”; and of “viscous slimy 
water generated out of the fatness of the earth.” 

Vaughan claimed to have seen, handled, and tasted * 
what he believed to be the first matter, of which he says 
immediately later: ‘‘ In vegetables it oftentimes appears, 
for they feed not—-as some think—on water, but on this 
seminal viscosity that is hid in the water. This indeed 
they attract at the roots, and from thence it ascends to 
the branches, but sometimes it happens by the way to 
break out at the bark, where, meeting with the cold air, 
it subsists and congeals toa gum. ‘This congelation is not 
sudden, but requires some small time, for if you find it 
while it is fresh it is an exceedingly subtle moisture but 
glutinous, for it will spin into strings as small as any hair ; 
and had it passed up to the branches it had been formed 
—in time—to a plum or cherry.” Over and over again 
allusions are made in Vaughan’s eloquent and incom- 
prehensible essays to some volatile coagulable origin of 
all things, formed, under the direction of some divine 
chemistry, from all the elements, ‘‘ fire, air and pure 
earth, overcast indeed with water.” 

Compare some of those imaginings with the descriptions 
1 A similar claim is made with the greatest gravity by modern 


spiritualists, who even promise to analyse what even a sceptic would 
allow should be beyond the material. 


1gI 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





of the manifestations supposed to have taken place in 
connection with a medium, as recorded by Baron von 
Schrenck Notzing, and the similarity between the words 
of the modern scientist and the seventeenth-century mystic 
will be found striking.! 


Let it be added that phenomena, even in a “new 
science,” should not be discarded because they have 
lain more or less-dormant throughout time. Revela- 
tion awaits its own interpreters. Admittedly that is 
a fair statement. But on the other hand it is equally 
fair to express some dismay that when psychical 
investigation has encouraged every path to spiritual 
correspondence the kind of evidence of materializa- 
tion even from an observer so scientific and so free 
from dogmatism as Professor Richet is marked with 
a shoddy triviality that rings out its resounding verdict 
for the material. Professor Richet records: 


At the Villa Carmen I saw another very well-defined 
materialization, now published for the first time. 

On the day preceding my departure, after a long stay 
at Algiers, Bien Boa, speaking by the voice of Marthe, 
said, in order to detain me, ‘‘Stay! You will see her 
whom you desire.” It will easily be understood that I 
stayed. 

On the next day, almost as soon as the curtains were 


1 Physic and Fiction, 
2 Her voice was halting and wooden and guttural, a sort of Punchi- 
nello’s voice. (Richet’s footnote.) 


192 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





drawn, they were reopened, and between them appeared 
the face of a young and beautiful woman with a kind of 
gilt ribbon or diadem covering her fair hair and the crown 
of her head. She was laughing heartily and seemed greatly 
amused ; I can still vividly recall her laugh and her pearly 
teeth. She appeared two or three times, showing her head 
and then hiding it, like a child playing bo-peep. Then she 
refused to return. The general said to me, “Put your 
hand behind the curtain and you can touch her hair,” which 
I did ; and he added, ‘It is soft like silk, is it not?” I 
replied, ‘‘ Excuse me, it is more like horse-hair,” and in 
fact this was the sensation produced. I then received a 
light tap on the back of the hand; the hair was felt no 
more, and a voice from behind the curtain said, ‘< Bring 
scissors to-morrow.” I brought the scissors next day. 
The Egyptian queen returned, but only showed the crown 
of her head with very fair and very abundant hair; she 
was anxious to know if I had brought the scissors. I 
then took a handful of her long hair, but I could scarcely 
distinguish the face that she kept concealed behind the 
curtain. As I was about to cut a lock high up, a firm 
hand behind the curtain lowered mine, so that I cut only 
about six inches from the end. As I was rather slow 
about doing this, she said in a low voice, “Quick! Quick!” 
and disappeared. I have kept this lock; it is very fine, 
silky, and undyed. Microscopical examination shows it 
to be real hair; and I am informed that a wig of the same 
would cost a thousand francs. Marthe’s hair is very dark, 
and she wears her hair rather short. 

It would seem that the purpose that this Egyptian prin- 
cess had in view was that I should cut off a lock of her 
hair (?), for I saw her no more. Next day, in visiting 
Mme Noel, who was ill, I half saw, very vaguely, a 


N 193 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





fugitive form in the dressing-room which vanished as [| ap- 
proached. But my recollection of this is very undefined.' 


Even after a careful reading of this passage I am 
tempted to believe I am stupid enough to have fallen 
upon some flight of satire. It would seem unbeliey- 
able that anyone could claim material hair for spiritual 
revelation ! 

(c) Automatic writing may be summed up on 
its failure to produce any evidence of extraneous 
influence beyond a natural explanation. What it 
records is either already known or beyond proof or 
denial, being simply a vague and elusive message like 
“Piave.” It has never presented any national revela- 
tion of the future which should from an interested 
spiritual plane be conceivable ; it has never presented 
any personal information which could not have been 
derived by telepathy or the subconscious. (The imag- 
inary messages from eminent persons bear the stamp 
of earthly minds rather under than above the average. 
When Byron, hurried from the shades, remarks with 
petulance, 


Vex not the bard, his lyre is broken 
His last song sung, his last word spoken, 


one realizes the historical wisdom of respecting the 
silence of the dead !) 


1 Thirty Years of Psychical Research. 
194 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





But the spiritual explanation of automatic writing 
is no longer held by advanced investigators, to whom 
the material explanation is overwhelming. 

““Let us put aside these divagations,” remarks 
Professor Richet; “they would only be matter for 
laughter if it were not for the melancholy fact that 
they have been accepted as genuine by honourable 
men. In fact they are but manifestations of the 
subconsciousness of the mediums, which is often 
below mediocrity.” 

(2) Mediums. In any examination of the claims 
of spiritualistic phenomena under trance conditions 
the same attitude should be employed—namely, given 
a supernatural or extraneous influence, has any con- 
vincing presentation of separate spiritual person- 
ality ever been produced, assuming that the spiritual 
is a higher plane than the material? Secondly, judg- 
ing by such evidence as is provided by spiritualists, 
is there any objection to the view that all such 
phenomena within the boundaries of material in- 
spiration are conditions, however mysterious, of the 
subconscious ? 

The medium is as ancient as the witch. The 
‘“‘familiar spirit” was regarded with deepening sus- 
picion in the days of the Israelites, and has century 


1 Thirty Years of Psychical Research, 
195 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








by century baffled and disappointed, being unexplain- 
able and yet profoundly provocative and disappointing. 
The Church accordingly forbade all séances, satisfied 
with the comprehensive ruling that as the spiritual 
was perfection, and these revelations were puerile, 
they must come from the Devil. Such an attitude 
displayed a rough-and-ready scepticism that is re- 
freshing in our hazardous modern reverence for the 
obscure. 

The actual trance conditions of the medium have 
altered hardly at all during the long retreat of super- 
stition before science. All through the progress of 
the medium the spiritual hypothesis has been advanced 
upon the assumption that by no other channel could 
an uneducated woman express erudite knowledge. 
There is no necessity to accept such a sensational 
verdict. In direct correspondence, a spiritual person- 
ality anxious to provide proof of survival after death 
(upon which Sir Oliver Lodge has repeatedly laid 
stress) would reveal some information not known to 
mortality unless the spiritual is upon the same plane 
as the material, which is impossible. Wherefore to 
claim for the spiritual what can be performed equally 
upon material hypotheses is to court ultimate con- 
fusion, When Sir William Barrett, in his experi- 
ments with an unprofessional medium, convinced 
196 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 








himself that he could communicate with her from 
the distance of a mile he demonstrated (at any rate 
to his own satisfaction) the astounding properties 
of telepathy. Scientific inquiry was to that extent 
furthered. But if it was anything it was a demon- 
stration of natural, not spiritual, law. 

Beyond what is obviously inspired by subconscious 
correspondence there remains no evidence whatever 
that any medium has lifted the screen that must 
divide a material from a spiritual world. Numerous 
persons are assured they have received messages from 
their deceased relatives. To deny the existence of 
extraneous influence is therefore naturally an affront. 
When any person is refreshed by the belief that 
the dead have returned there can be no absolute 
and convincing counter-argument upon the lines of 
practical proof. But it can be stated that mediums 
or persons with psychic gifts perform greater miracles 
without any dependence upon, or recognition of, the 
supernatural, It can be further pointed out that the 
description of another world is invariably in accord- 
ance with the religious denomination or social status 
of the narrator. In other words, it is a fair assump- 
tion that however human ideas of the spiritual state 
may change from decade to decade and century to 
century the eternal should reflect an unmistakable 

197 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


conservatism. To examine the spiritual by the 
spiritual is surely a fair and honest hypothesis. 

It has been advanced that the spiritual visitants, 
appreciating the rank scepticism of this passing world, 
are determined to prove their survival for the consola- 
tion of their relatives. Were that so, they make a 
pitiful enough exhibition of their incapacity. Their 
failure is so profound that they are convicted upon 
their own evidence. But let them be judged on 
that basis. Let their words be studied as voices from 
eternity where all is known and all is perfection. 

The examples that follow are not carefully sought, 
but are typical in their incoherence, their gross associa- 
tion, and their lack of any conceivable importance. 
They ring out like mournful bells sounding some 
hopeless and inevitable presage of extinction. 

Long since, in Elizabethan days, the founder of 
modern spiritualism, Dr John Dee, was duped by a 
scamp called Kelly, and under the impression that 
he could turn gross metal into gold died in great 
obscurity and indigence. But his records of conver- 
sations with the spiritual are just as promising as 
their successors. They are in fact just as coherent, 
just as illuminating, just as commonplace. Indeed, 
the following is, on the whole, more coherent and not 
so childish as the majority of modern communications. 
198 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





It means nothing—it suggests no objective. It carries 
the note of its age, and is playfully evasive when 
crude reality is sought. 


She. Whose man are you? 

Dee. 1 am the servant of God, both by my bound duty, 
and also (I hope) by His adoption. 

A voice. You shall be beaten if you tell. 

She. Am I not a fine maiden? Give me leave to play 
in your house ; my mother told me she would come and 
dwell here. [She went up and down with most lively 
gestures of a young girl playing by herself, and divers times 
another spake to her from the corner of my study by a great 
perspective glass, but none was seen beside herself.| Shall 
I? Iwill. [Now she seemed to answer me in the afore- 
said corner of my study.| 1 pray you let me tarry a little. 
[Speaking to me in the foresaid corner. | 

Dee. Tell me what you are. 

She. I pray you let me play with you a little, and I 
will tell you who I am. 

Dee. In the name of Jesus then, tell me. 

She. I rejoice in the name of Jesus, and I am a poor 
little maiden; I am the last but one of my mother’s 
children; I have little baby children at home. 

Dee. Where is your home? 

She. I dare not tell you where I dwell, I shall be 
beaten. 

Dee. You shall not be beaten for telling the truth 
to them that love the truth; to the Eternal Truth all 
creatures must be obedient. 

She. I warrant you I will be obedient; my sisters say 
they must all come and dwell with you. 


199 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


Dee. I desire that they who love God should dwell 
with me, and I with them. 

She. I love you now you talk of God. 

Dee. Your eldest sister—her name is Esiméli. 

She. My sister is not so short as you make her. 

Dee. O, I cry you mercy! She is to be pronounced 
Esimili ! 

Kelly. She smileth ; one calls her, saying, ‘‘ Come away, 
maiden.” 

She. I will read over my gentlewomen first ; my master 
Dee will teach me if I say amiss. 

Dee. Read over your gentlewomen, as it pleaseth you. 

She. I have gentlemen and gentlewomen; look you 
here. 

Kelly. She bringeth a little book out of her pocket. 
She pointeth to a picture in the book. 

She. Is not this a pretty man ? 

Dee. What is his name ? 

She. My [mother] saith his name is Edward; look you, 
he hath a crown upon his head; my mother saith that this 
man was Duke of York.} 





There was no suggestion then or since that this 
revelation served any ostensible purpose. But it over- 
whelmed Dr Dee, whom an influential spiritualist has 
hailed as the founder of psychical research. 

The following is a séance recorded by Sir Oliver 
Lodge some three hundred years after the foregoing 
example of what is claimed to be a new and pro- 
gressive science: 


+ 'W. H. Davenport Adams, Witch, Warlock, and Magician, 
200 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 


The full account of these sittings is long, and would 
require a great deal of annotation to make the details clear. 
For the sake of brevity, I propose merely to abstract them. 
There are a number of erroneous statements, some of them 
to be partially accounted for by the fact that Dr and Mrs 
C. are cousins (a fact which I did not know, and which 
Phinuit did not ascertain); so he mixed their relatives at 
the second sitting. The family seems to be a very large 
one. I quote later the misstatements, but first I pick out 
the correct ones or those which require comment. 

Sitting No. 43. Monday evening, December 23rd. 
Present: Dr and MrsC. and O. J. L. (Statement correct 
when not otherwise noted.) 

**How’s little Daisy? She will get over her cold. 
But there’s something the matter with her head. There’s 
somebody round you lame and somebody hard of hearing. 
That little girl has got music in her. This lady is fidgety. 
There are four of you, four going to stop with you, one 
gone out of the body. One got irons on his foot. Mrs 
Allen in her surroundings is the one with iron on leg. 
{Allen was maiden name of mother of lame one.] There’s 
about four hundred of your family. There’s Kate; you 
callher Kitty. She’s the one that’s kind ofacrank. Trust- 
worthy, but cranky. She will fly off and get married, she 
will. Thinks she knows everything, she does. [This 
is the nurse-girl, Kitty, about whom they seem to have a 
joke that she is a walking compendium of information. ] 
[ An envelopewith letters written inside N—H—P—O—Q 
was here handed in, and Phinuit wrote down B—J—R— 
O—I—S, not in the best of tempers.] A second cousin 
of your mother’s drinks. The little dark-eyed one is Daisy. 
I like her. She can’t hear very well. The lame one is 
asister’s child. [A cousin’s child, and one née Allen, really. ] 

201 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


The one that’s deaf in her head is the one that’s got the 
music in her. That’s Daisy, and she’s going to have the 
paints I told you of. [Fond of painting.] She’s growing 
up to be a beautiful woman. She ought to have a paper 
ear. [An artificial drum had been contemplated.] You 
have an Aunt Eliza. ‘There are three Maries, Mary the 
mother, Mary the mother, Mary the mother. [Grand- 
mother, aunt, and granddaughter.] Three brothers and 
two sisters your lady has. Three in the body. There 
were eleven in your family, two passed out small. [Only 
know of nine.] Fred is going to pass out suddenly. He 
married a cousin. He writes. He has shining things. 
Lorgnettes. Heisaway. He’s got a catchy trouble with 
heart and kidneys, and will pass out suddenly.” [Not the 
least likely. I have inquired and find that the ‘ Fred” 
supposed to be intended is still alive in 1909. O. J. L.]? 


It is not my desire to provoke amusement at this 
record, which contains actual data beyond normal ex- 
planation. Given certain hypotheses, the conclusions 
of Sir Oliver Lodge are both fair and moderate. But 
such evidence, if it proves anything, proves the extra- 
ordinary powers of the subconscious upon the purely 
material plane. Every word rings with sympathetic 
thought-transference. ‘To attempt to associate the 
spiritual with such fantastic evolutions is utterly 
contrary to the most crude conception of spiritual 
values. That many intelligent persons should claim 
to be satisfied with the lowering of the spiritual to 

1 The Survival of Man. 
2.02 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





commonplace standards can be understood only upon 
the drastic hypothesis that material and spiritual are 
equal and similar. Under such a monstrous assertion 
one might as well set out to convince the Peculiar 
People that they are not peculiar. 

Now the record just quoted is admittedly in- 
offensive. But upon the spiritualist’s hypothesis that 
the material consciousness is unaffected by its new 
environment all messages from the unseen have the 
same validity. In other words, one must not be 
snobbish in things spiritual! Where, then, does one 
halt? At what stage does one snub the supernatural ? 
There can be no going back. Upon the evidence 
provided by the spiritualist the world to come holds 
possibilities far more appalling than mere hell-fire! 

To the normal mind the following séance is a typical 
instance of clairvoyance: 

Medium| Mr Tyrre/]. With the gentleman right against 
the wall I see a gentleman pointing for someoneacross there. 
He would be fifty-six before passing into spirit life. A 
fairly well-built man. He is surrounded with sea-shells, 
and I should judge he would be passionately fond of music. 
Probably his whole time would be spent with music. He 
wears a dark tweed suit. Not passed away many years. 
He holds up acornet and had something to do with a band. 
His name is Isaac Shepherd. I get Westfield Road, Shipley, 
with this gentleman. He is bringing a young soldier with 
him, and he wants me to tell you that this is Mrs Varley’s 

2.03 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 








boy. He says: ‘‘ Dry the tears from your eyes, Mother.” 
He is glad he has done his duty. 

[ Recognised. | 

With you, friend. What a beautiful girl comes there 
in your surroundings! She isin spirit robes. As I look 
at you your face is lit up with a beautiful mantle. She is 
holding over your head such a beautiful basket of flowers, 
and across the basket these words illuminated: ‘‘ In affec- 
tionate memory of Martha Collins who passed away 9th 
March, 1898.” 

[The person addressed did not know her, but someone else 
in the audience recognised the name. | 

With this friend here: there is a beautiful lady in your 
surroundings, about sixty-four or sixty-five. She might 
be older, but would carry age well. Ithink she was a 
lady that knew about spiritualism, and she seems to me 
to have done a little magnetic healing in her time. She 
has been passed away some time, for the earth conditions 
are falling away. Her name is Mrs Tate. 

Answer. I know her. 

Medium. Did she know about spiritualism ? 

Answer. Yes. 

[Cousin of someone present, but not a former member of 
the church. | 

Medium. With our friend here, a beautiful girl. I 
should take her to be seventeen before passing. She was 
trying to show herself this afternoon, but could not. She 
is looking round for someone. Her hair flows down her 
back. She is in spirit robe, and holding up an anchor, 
and on the anchor are these words: ‘‘In affectionate re- 
membrance of Edith (Whitehope or W hiteoak), who passed 
away October Ist, 1889.” A long while back. It is her 
birthday to-morrow in spirit. 


2.04. 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 








Answer. Yes. 

Medium. She says something about letting her mother 
know. 

Answer. Twilllet her mother know. The mother was 
here this afternoon. 

Medium. There isa gentlemanhere, about seventy-three 
or seventy-four years old. A well-built gentleman, some- 
what redin complexion. I should think he would not have 
ailed much as a general rule, yet I think he would get a little 
bit feeble before passing away. He wears a kind of Scotch 
tweed suit. Full in body, with moustache and beard round 
here [pointing], and bushy eyebrows. He is surprised to 
come back here. He would have been surprised if asked 
to come toa spiritualist church in earth life. I get Thomas 
Rhodes, Daisy Hill Lane. He is showing me now a steel 
that butchers use; probably a butcher in earth life. 

[Recognised as ‘This lady’s uncle.” |* 


Ill 

Now it is as difficult to disprove that an immortal 
soul wears a tall hat as it is to prove he wears a crown 
of gold. The standpoint of the spiritualist is unassail- 
able upon material grounds. It becomes incredible 
only when estimated by even the most moderate 
spiritual hypothesis. ‘It were better,” wrote Bacon 
in one of his essays, “to have no opinion of God 
at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him; 
for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely: and 
certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.” 


1 J, Arthur Hill, Spiritualism, its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine, 
205 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


Once again the whole basis for judgment returns, as 
it must always return, to some compromise between the 
conception of the supernatural and its relationship with 
the natural. How can a compromise be accomplished? 
Has in fact there ever been an impressive historical 
instance of the spiritual ruling human affairs? 

When a despairing or antagonistic mind condemns 
religion as the historical enemy of liberty and progress 
it is coloured by the background of medieval theology 
or modern Evangelicalism. It is impressed by the 
ebb and flow of the warfare between two worlds. A 
vengeful God or a sentimental Christ—here has been 
the persistent, enduring reproach of the spiritual which 
has provided the outline of this survey. For weal or 
woe the Roman Church sold the thrones of heaven at 
a price, since Christianity was not within the grasp 
of a gross and superstitious peasantry. The spiritual 
was therefore degraded to the comprehension of the 
crowd, and being comprehended was finally suspect 
and discredited. 

Secondly, it has been shown how the Reformation, 
pledged to reaction from the things of earth, pro- 
duced a sense of eternity that was not a vision, but 
a nightmare. In preaching the urgency of personal 
salvation Calvinism was progressive enough, but it 
also presented a heaven of portentous judgments 
206 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





instead of an evolutionary plane of ultimate per- 
fection, Such spiritual discipline hardened national 
character, as was evident in Scotland, because it gave 
faith to life and a lively sense of that mortality in 
which progress is rooted. But it was a definite 
advance upon a by-road. 

The succeeding stage, produced by the Industrial 
Revolution of the nineteenth century, either ignored 
the spiritual as unprofitable or degraded it to the 
deplorable Evangelicalism of “Gentle Jesus, meek 
and mild.” In all the preceding agony of religious 
intolerance Almighty God had at least remained a 
figure remote and full of mystery. 

Hence it has evolved this approved depreciation 
of the spiritual which is the most striking apologia 
of metapsychics. What would seem at a glance to 
prove the bankruptcy of spiritualism is its greatest 
strength. The capacity of the human mind to 
credit what is incredible has always stood at the 
door of truth. Of all human terrors the most lasting 
(as it is the most inevitable) is the fear of death. 
Spiritualism is the latest emollient for a universal 
complaint. 

How does the spiritualist explain the absurdities 
of his evidence? It presents no difficulties whatever. 
The solution is so beguiling that it has eased the 

207 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





wholesome dread in many a credulous and thought- 
less mind. It preaches the gospel of uninterrupted 
existence undisturbed even by the loss of cigarettes. 
How does spiritualism explain the seeming futility of 
the world it describes? It explains it by the ingenuous 
answer that the spiritual is on the same level as the 
material. 

This attitude toward eternity is after all the 
reflection of the modern mind. For a considerable 
time the Church, with no justification in Holy Writ 
or traditional doctrine, has comforted the bereaved 
with the assurance that death is but an amiable 
awakening in heaven. To this soporific doctrine, 
which entails neither forethought, honest endeavour, 
nor any ethical conception of this life or another, the 
spiritualist has added a new and final degradation, 
He has preached the gospel of chaos in heaven. 

There arises at this stage a very natural point, 
and one that concerns this unexpected credulity in 
an age admittedly sceptical and progressive. Un- 
happily scepticism has never ranked higher than its 
worth, and progress is a matter of opinion. There are 
none so eager in inquiry as the unorthodox, while pro- 
gress in mechanical and time-saving appliances must 
not be mistaken for progress in the higher standards 


of civilization. The rivalry between science and 
208 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 





superstition left the former by the end of the nine- 
teenth century in undisputed possession of the field. 
From that period onward there seemed no limits to 
the possibilities of the inventive genius. For a time 
—perhaps until the War sent a shudder throughout 
the world because of the machines of death that 
genius produced—the popular imagination was on 
fire with the wonders of our era. To-day the spirit 
of reaction is visible. In the amazing facilities of 
our modern existence there is missing that soul of 
permanence and individual expression concerning 
which science has no data and atheism no revela- 
tion. In the temporary interest shown in psychical 
phenomena there is this additional tragedy, that what- 
ever really exists beyond the inaccessible grottos 
of the human fantasy is already being claimed and 
summarized by science and passing as of yore from 
superstition into knowledge. The phase of spiritual- 
ism will pass. It may be—so disturbing are the 
concepts of the human mind—that with the last 
ebb of the belief in spiritualistic manifestations the 
veritable lamp of hope will flicker and die for 
the adherents of the “New Revelation.” It is a 
prospect that is not without its tragedy. 
Professor Charles Richet, in Thirty Years of 
Psychical Research, records: 
Q 2.09 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





supreme over the universe, is to invest moral distinctions 
with immensity and eternity, and lift them from the 
provincial stage of human society to the imperishable 
theatre of all being. When planted thus in the very 
substance of things, they justify and support the ideal 
estimates of the conscience; they deepen every guilty 
shame; they guarantee every righteous hope; and they 
help the will with a Divine casting vote in every balance 
of temptation.”2 ‘That morality has a basis in human 
society, that Nature has a Religion, surely makes the 
Death of the soul when left to itself all the more appalling. 
It means that, between them, Nature and morality provide 
all for virtue—except the Life to live it.? 


In other words, conviction of man’s place in the 
universe means character, because it means expres- 
sion. In our industrial civilization one of the most 
melancholy and disappointing factors has proved to 
be that, despite protective trade unions, old age 
pensions, medical panels, and the means of cheap 
amusement, the proletariat is aware of a physical and 
intellectual slavery which is apparently without release, 
because its origins are moral and not material. The 
chances of physical freedom are wonderful. The 
opportunities for ethical liberty have slowly vanished 
away. 

1 Martineau, Wide the whole symposium on “ The Influences upon 


Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief,” Nineteenth Century, vol. i. 
2 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 


212 





THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 


———$ 


Dr Schweitzer has recently written : 


With the giving up of ethical ideals which accompanies 
our passion for reality our practical efficiency is not, 
therefore, improved, but diminished. It does not make 
the man of to-day a cool observer and calculator such as 
he supposes himself to be, for he is under the influence 
of opinions and emotions which are created in him by 
facts. All unconsciously he mixes with what is the work 
of his reason so much of what is emotional that the one 
spoils the other. Within this circle move the judgments 
and impulses of our society, whether we deal with the 
largest questions or the smallest. Individuals and nations 
alike, we deal indiscriminately with real and imaginary 
values, and it is just this confused medley of real and 
unreal, of sober thought and capacity for enthusiasm for 
the unmeaning, that makes the mentality of the modern 
man so puzzling and so dangerous." 


In a chapter of this book the expression of the 
spiritual in Scotland has been treated with some 
detail, because even if the influence of the super- 
natural upon the natural is challenged, even if it is 
advanced that character can be moulded at too stern 
a price, the incontrovertible fact remains, and is 
rather strengthened by such charges, that with faith 
civilization advances, even when it is dimmed by mis- 
conception and darkened by human violence. 

This conclusion is supported also by the sustained 


1 The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization, 
213 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 


conviction and teaching of all human wisdom and 
revelation that the spiritual is won not dy, but 
against the material conception of life. However 
skilfully smoothed away, it was the solemn assertion 
of Christ that a man must be born again, or he 
cannot enter the-kingdom of heaven; that to love 
life is to lose the eternal values; that in the essence 
of worldliness is the poison that corrodes both body 
and soul. With our comfortable modern gospel the 
Church has struggled to explain away doctrines 
which would cause grave offence to greatly valued 
worshippers. But the fact remains. It is the 
Christian revelation. It is also a practical and 
historical truth. Science may reveal what is the 
relationship of the natural world to man. But it 
lies within historical evidence as much as mystical 
faith to emphasize the infinitely greater part that 
the spiritual has played in human destinies. Refuse 
to admit any save the material sources in the lives of 
idealists, saints, and martyrs; let it be allowed that 
they all laboured under some crude fanaticism, that 
the summum bonum was a vision which, however ex- 
cellent, was a splendid intellectual dream; the fact 
remains that beyond the material confines of know- 
ledge and custom, beyond necessity and inclination, 
some incomprehensible force drove such men to 
214. 


THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 


point the way toward a deeper sense of human 
| °y *4° 
responsibility. 


The breath of God, blowing where it listeth, touches 
with its mystery of Life the dead souls of men, bears them 
across the bridgeless gulf between the natural and the 
spiritual, between the spiritually inorganic and the spirit- 
ually organic, endows them with its own high qualities, 
and develops within them these new and secret faculties 
by which those who are born again are said to see the 
Kingdom of God.* 

The tragedy of our civilization, leaving it arid 
and disturbed, surrounded by its marvels of mechani- 
cal ingenuity, and haunted by the shadow of the 
futile and evanescent, is the decay of ethical corre- 
spondence between the material and the spiritual. . 
Individuality has been submerged, and with it has 
passed the formation of character, and with the pride 
of knowledge has gone the genius of conviction and 
contemplation. It is observed with disillusionment 
that facts are unstable, and what is known is full of 
perplexity and contradiction. But it is also true now 
as always that behind reason is revelation, and be- 
hind the actual is the ideal. The fundamental essence 
of true civilization inclines therefore to be a rugged 
philosophy of life based upon the consecration of 
nature by morality. In it is little enough of the 


1 Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 
215 


_ THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





visionary philosophy of a golden age. It recognizes 
instead that the development of character is more 
precious than the modern ideal of communism in 
nationality. It perceives that progress is guided by 
individual idealism and not by an elusive dream of 
utilitarian affluence. 


216 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Apams, W. H. Davenport: Witch, Warlock, and Magician 
(Chatto and Windus). 

Biack, G. W.: Folk Medicine (publication of the Folklore 
Society). 

Buckie, H. T.: History of Civilization in England, vols. i, 
li, and 111 (Longmans, Green). 

Burton, J. H.: Criminal Trials in Scotland, vols. i and i 
(Chapman and Hall). 

CampBELL, J. G.: Superstitions of the Highlands (MacLehose). 

Cou.tton, G. G.: 4 Medieval Garner (Constable), Five 
Centuries of Religion (Cambridge University Press). 

Drummonp, Henry: Natural Law in the Spiritual World 
(Hodder and Stoughton). 

Fercusson, A. W.: Sons of the Manse (Matthew). 

Hart_anp, E.S.: The Science of Fairy Tales (Walter Scott). 

Hix, J. ArrHuR: Spiritualism, its History, Phenomena, and 
Doctrine (Cassell). 

Lecxy, W. E.: Rationalism in Europe, vol. i (Longmans, 
Green), History of European Morals (Longmans, 
Green). 

Levi, Exrenas: Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and 
Ritual, translated by Arthur Edward Waite (William 
Rider). 

Linton, E. Lynn: Witch Stories (Chapman and Hal). 

LopcE, Oxiver: The Survival of Man (Methuen). 

Mackinnon, James: 4 History of Modern Liberty, vols. i 
and ii (Longmans, Green). 

217 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT 





MaipMENT, James: The Spottiswoode Miscellany, vols. i 
and ii (printed for the Spottiswoode Society). 

Marrianp, S. R.: The Dark Ages (F. and J. Rivington). 

Maupstey, Henry: Natural Causes and Supernatural 
Seeming (Kegan Paul). 

Micue.et, J.: La Sorciere, translated by L. J. Trotter 
(Simpkin, Marshall). 

Muir, P. McApam: Modern Substitutes for Christianity 
(Hodder and Stoughton). 

Murray, M. A.: The Witch Cult in Western Europe 
Oxford University Press). See also article in Folklore, 
vol. xxviii, No. 3. 

Napier, James: Folklore (Gardner). 

Norestein, Watiace: 4 History of Witchcraft in England 
from 1558 to 1718 (Washington: American Historical 
Association. London: Oxford University Press). 

Park, Roswett: The Evil Eye Thanatology (Boston: 
Richard G. Badger). 

Payne, J. F.: English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times 
(Oxford University Press). 

Pearson, Kari: Chances of Death, vol. ii (Edward Arnold). 

Pertricrew, T. J.: On Superstitions connected with the 
History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery (John 
Churchill). 

Provanp, W. S.: Puritanism in the Scottish Church 
(Gardner). 

Reape, Winwoop: The Martyrdom of Man (Kegan Paul). 

Ricuet, CuHaries: Thirty Years of Psychical Research 
(Collins). 

ScHWEITZER, ALBERT: The Decay and the Restoration of 
Civilization, translated by C. T. Campion (Black). 

Scot, RecinaLD: Discoverie of Witchcraft. 

Scorr, WaLTER : Demonology and Witchcraft (Murray). 


218 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


SHARPE, C. K.: The History of Witchcraft in Scotland 
(Hamilton, Adams and Co.). 

SPRIGGE, SQUIRE: Physic and Fiction (Hodder and 
Stoughton). 

STorY, W. W.: Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye (Chap- 
man and Hall). 

THORNDIKE, Lynn: 4 History of Magic and Experimental 
Sczence (Macmillan). 

TuRBERVILLE, A. S.: Mediaeval Heresy and the Inquisition 
(Crosby Lockwood). 

Watsh, J. J.: Medieval Medicine (Black). | 

Woorron, A. C.: Chronicles of Pharmacy, vols. i and ii 
(Macmillan). 

Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vols. i and v. 

Report of a Clerical and Medical Committee of Inquiry into 
Spiritual Faith and Mental Healing (Macmillan). 
Witches of Renfrewshire, The (published by Alexander 

Gardner). 








BeNOR OF WIFTGHGRART 


MR KELLO 


BY 
IAN FERGUSON 


Size 44x 5 inches, 7s. 6d. net 





EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS 


Daily Telegraph: 

<¢ A remarkable book, vivid and intense from first to 
last. Nothing stronger or more dramatic has come from 
Scotland since The House with the Green Shutters.” 


Morning Post: 
‘A feat of literary art.” 


The Times: 
‘¢Mr Ferguson has achieved a remarkable repre- 
sentation of contemporary life and morals.” 


Glasgow Herald: 


“Unquestionably one of the weirdest and most 
powerfully enthralling of recent Scottish novels.” 


MicuarEL Tempe in The Referee: 

‘Scotch, sombre, and sinister, this is an extra- 
ordinary and in some ways a dreadful book, a remorse- 
less study of the devilish masquerade of religion 
inflicted on the Lowlands by the sixth James.” 


oe a F if ah wr of Mae aie As 





* 7 
a2 & 


—. 
=a. 


a | 
vt, 
Cfo 








GAYLORD 





| 














PRINTEDINU.S.A. 











BF1566 .F35 
The philosophy of witchcraft 


cal 


il 


et 


il 


e 






iia 


1 1012 00105 0865 fim 


